A Princeton-led team has built a tabletop device that generates voltage directly from Earth’s rotation through its magnetic field. While the power output is orders of magnitude too small for practical electronics, the breakthrough suggests Earth’s spin could someday provide constant, fuel-free energy if the effect scales up. The team is now calling for independent labs to reproduce the results.
But I guess the takeaway I was trying to illustrate, is that we live on a habitable planet, but most planets only get these conditions for a short blip of time, we seem to have gotten it for a long blip, but it won’t last. We need to figure out how to live in the more hostile environments of space and other planets without the magic conditions of earth if we truly want to survive past this blip, especially if we’re shortening our time here by burning massive amounts of fossil fuels.
Our tech has increased monumentally in the last couple of hundred years. From horse drawn carriages and parchment, to reusable space vehicles and computers. If this rate keeps up for a billion years, that’s 5,000,000x such a technological leap. Of course, disease, war, environmental degradation or other stupid human social idiocy will likely slow this down. But I think we should be able to get off world before the earth is inhabitable. Getting out of the solar system before it’s inhabitable is much harder, but we have a lot longer.