Oh great, I'm sure absolutely nothing can go wrong if you scale this up to meet humanity's growing demand for electricity.
It's free energy!
this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2025
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Oh this will be fun! But I wouldn't worry we going run out of drinkable water by 2040, so we don't need to worry about this.
I can't see this being useful; the amount of energy generated is just so far below what's practical to use. An equivalent size of solar panels would be cheaper and provide orders of magnitude more energy even when it's cloudy.
It's an interesting idea though, and cool that they were able to harvest any power at all.
I didn't bother to read the paper, but the article says the system produced "10s of nanoamps at 10s of microvolts". I'll just assume each of those values are "100", since that's the highest value you could describe as "10s" of something.
That works out to 0.01 nanowatts. For comparison the tiny solar panel on a solar powered calculator might produce 0.0075 watts, or 750 million times that amount of power.
In reality, since wattage is a multiple of volts and amps, lowering both of those figures from my highball estimate would massively decrease the wattage. The solar calculator probably produces billions of times more power than this 1 foot long cylinder.
So, i think its neat that they were able to measure an effect, but the article really should not even be mentioning power generation.
This.
That thing is at best a sensor, certainly not a power generation device.
The antenna in my phone likely "harvests" orders of magnitude more electricity when receiving signal.
Thermal seems like a better idea than this.
Still, i guess it's good to know. But with our luck, billionaires will find a way to make the earth stop spinning.
Anything is a better idea than this. An unpowered LED in a regular room will generate more electricity from light shining at it. An unpowered speaker in a normal environment generates more electricity from the sound waves that fall on it. A phone's antenna will harvest more energy from the signal it receives.
All of these options are horrendously bad and inefficient ways to generate electricity, and still all of them are orders of magnitude more effective than that thing.
Sounds like a great idea. Meet our popation's power demand by helping to weaken the Earth's magnetic field - which is currently busy protecting us from hostile-to-life electromagnetic radiation.
For a fraction of the cost of what it would take to make this possible, we could have every desert on the planet blanketed with solar panels and have enough energy for 100 civilizations.
All we need to do is bury about 100 individuals that are determined to fuck it for the rest of us.
I have a feeling covering deserts with solar panels will have some sort of negative impact on the environment. Those are habitats too, although inhospitable to most organisms.
Still, I see you point. It makes more sense to invest in green energy sources we know work and are already cheap. A combination of wind, solar, and hydro should be more than sufficient to supply the world’s energy needs. Although I still think we should be investing heavily into cold fusion research, because that’s still the holy grail.
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
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.
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?
Futurama did it first, and it didn't go well.
Blue blue shiny ball is fucked.
Nikolai Tesla theorized this 100 years ago. The plans that explain how his Wardenclyffe Tower was expected to work for data transmission were found, BUT he has said there was a secondary purpose for generating power from the Earth's magnetic field and core rotation that he never detailed. I dont think they ever got that far, but he was clearly aware that the Earth's magnetosphere was not the only generated sphere that was useful.
Pretty much what Tesla said.
Was this the energy source Nikola Tesla was talking about?