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.
I bet harvesting the angular momentum of the planet would be completely safe for sustainability of life, who needs seasons anyway.
We already monitor the length of a day to figure out when to add leap seconds, if we do start using a significant portion, we’d know. (Of course, we know we are lighting the world on fire by selling LNG and letting people have private jets, and still haven’t stopped.)
would we? or would they deny that its happening until the end, to make more money for the deranged? Also i’m not saying this is happening right now, but if they scale up this technology to massive facilities that might produce worthwhile amounts of electricity. Damn, it actually reminds me of mako reactors in ff7.
We’d know our impact, but we might still keep unsustainably stealing angular momentum, for a variety of reasons.
Similar to we know we need to stop extracting fossil fuels, but we do it anyway.
I doubt we would manage to extract enough energy to affect seasons. The Earth is pretty massive.
We will be extinct way before that, we have around ~2100 at best, and decades before that life won’t be comfortable for most people.
they say its “free energy”, so i would imagine they would start scaling up the production by making more and more facilities. And even though we will fuck up the planet by that point and kill ourselves, if it still turns there is still a chance something new might evolve eventually. But if the planet doesnt even spin, it will likely turn into lifeless rock.
This was my first thought lol. I hope they also have the other direction figured out, i.e. expend energy to speed the rotation up. Otherwise please do not send this to prod, we have enough problems already