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Scientists build device to harvest electricity from Earth's spin (www.earth.com)

submitted 1 day ago by noumenon@lemmy.world to c/science@lemmy.world

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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.

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[–] bss03@infosec.pub 1 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

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.)

[–] reksas@sopuli.xyz 3 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] bss03@infosec.pub 2 points 21 hours ago

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.