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.
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.
I think there’s hope as long as we don’t nuke ourselves back into the stone age. If we keep a steady pace of progress and take good care of our only habitable space ship, we should be able to figure out how to thrive pretty much anywhere in space. Self inflicted extinction events are the biggest threats at the moment.