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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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[–] reksas@sopuli.xyz 5 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] cevn@lemmy.world 2 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] partofthevoice@lemmy.zip 2 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

Well, is angular momentum an ancient remnant of some prior activity or is there ongoing physics that keep its momentum? Because if there’s ongoing physics, logic would have me believe that the momentum would return simply by stopping our process of stealing it.

[–] cevn@lemmy.world 2 points 15 hours ago

Hmm.. good question. My current understanding is that it is leftovers of an ancient process and it slowly reduces over time regardless, we have to add leap seconds occasionally? Like maybe the dust cloud of earth sort of sucked together spinning, slowly at first, then faster as everything tied up and smacked into each other, eventually including the impact from the moon?