but _why_ does the earth rotate ?
Can Earth's rotation generate power? Physicists divided over controversial claim
151–160 of 231 posts
Re: Can Earth's rotation generate power? Physicists divided over controversial claim
#152The Earths rotation already generates power for us: wind. It’s why the jet stream only goes one direction.
> It’s why the jet stream only goes one direction
Yet local winds blow in almost every direction. So to access that energy you'd need a structure 5 miles tall.
Re: Can Earth's rotation generate power? Physicists divided over controversial claim
#153Re: Can Earth's rotation generate power? Physicists divided over controversial claim
#154It's incredible the lengths humanity is willing to go to avoid adopting nuclear energy - despite the US navy driving mobile reactors millions of miles over the last 70 years.
The Navy isn’t constrained by economics. Nuclear doesn’t make sense economically compared to things like solar and batteries.
> The Navy isn’t constrained by economics.
In what way is it not? It has a budget and a mission. Economics are a huge part of their existence. Far more is spent on health care every year over the Navy.
Re: Can Earth's rotation generate power? Physicists divided over controversial claim
#155It would be interesting if this works. Last time people were hyping up a tiny effect with big ramifications that can only exist due to a subtle 'loophole', it was the EmDrive stuff that turned out to be driven by measurement errors. But I'm no expert in electrostatics.
I was about 99.99999% sure that one was bogus because it was violating bedrock conservation laws. I'm not sure that this does. AFAIK there is no conservation law that says a spinning mass can't extract power from that. Still... it would have been hilarious of the EmDrive had worked. "Well, they've progressed! Last time we checked in on the third planet in this star system its inhabitants were still using warp drives…
Well conservation of energy says you can't extract energy out of nowhere. In the paper they claim that the extracted energy comes at the price of slowing down Earth's rotation. But then this seems to violate conservation of angular momentum... Maybe it depletes Earth's magnetic field instead?
Re: Can Earth's rotation generate power? Physicists divided over controversial claim
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Navy isn’t constrained by economics. Nuclear doesn’t make sense economically compared to things like solar and batteries.
> The Navy isn’t constrained by economics. In what way is it not? It has a budget and a mission. Economics are a huge part of their existence. Far more is spent on health care every year over the Navy.
I think it's more that the Navy isn't constrained by Nimby's and anti-nuclear lobbyists.
Re: Can Earth's rotation generate power? Physicists divided over controversial claim
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
Solve the waste problem and you solve nuclear. Waste is still the giant elephant in the room and a lot of people have a fifth grade solution to the problem (we will bury it under ground! We will fly it to the sun! We will resuse it until it is no longer radioactive!) I used to have a neighbor who worked for the DOE, all of the viable solutions are blocked by people who don’t want it in their backyard. Can’t really mo…
> Waste is still the giant elephant in the room and a lot of people have a fifth grade solution to the problem (we will bury it under ground! We will fly it to the sun! We will resuse it until it is no longer radioactive!) The correct solution: put it into dry casks and do nothing right now. Store it simple underground storage facilities or on the grounds of active nuclear power plants. The casks are fine for the nex…
> use rockets to slowly launch the waste into space. We can already design a storage capsule that can survive re-entry.
Do you have a source in mind for this claim? Even if a capsule could survive reentry, surely it wouldn't survive impact.
Re: Can Earth's rotation generate power? Physicists divided over controversial claim
#158I wonder how many wats of power we would be able to generate before earth slows down for i.e. 1 second longer day.
That's easy to work out but I can tell you not it's going to be more than we will ever use.
We have potentially millions or billions of years of history in front of us. If we find a way and a motive to have self-sustaining communities outside this planet, and considering our own history, it looks at least plausible that we will continue spreading, after dominating an entire planet against the brutal odds of natural selection, which we basically hacked with our consciousness to reach this state.
Keep in mind that energy is not electricity. When a rocket is burning huge amounts of fuel to reach orbit, that's energy we're using, a lot of it.
Re: Can Earth's rotation generate power? Physicists divided over controversial claim
#159There was a decent science fiction serris based on this premise: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/700919.Signal_to_Noise https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/737628.A_Signal_Shattere...
Eric Nylund's books are uniformly excellent, even (perhaps surprisingly) the Halo tie-ins
Never heard of him
Re: Can Earth's rotation generate power? Physicists divided over controversial claim
#160There was a decent science fiction serris based on this premise: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/700919.Signal_to_Noise https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/737628.A_Signal_Shattere...
"Decent"