71–80 of 231 posts
I suspect that they can generate electricity with angular momentum with it, that can be only used to do work with the equivalent angular momentum.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/700919.Signal_to_Noise
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/737628.A_Signal_Shattere...
Suggest a hard sci-fi story where humans abuse this so much the Earth basically stops rotating.
There 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...
Wouldn't this eventually slow down Earth's rotation? The rotational kinetic energy of our planet is 1/5 M * R^2 * w^2 with (approximately) M = 6e34 kg, R = 6.3e6m, w = 7.4e-5 rad/s, which gives approximately 5e36 joules. Yearly we need roughly 3e16 Wh. Yeah ok there's plenty. Woah! (also, I may be off by some orders of magnitude)
Doesn’t driving west to east on a highway slow down the Earth’s rotation, via the power transferred into the ground?
Calculate the change in the length of the Earth's day if the UK were to switch to vehicles driving on the right-hand side of the road rather than the left..
It'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.
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…
Wouldn't this eventually slow down Earth's rotation? The rotational kinetic energy of our planet is 1/5 M * R^2 * w^2 with (approximately) M = 6e34 kg, R = 6.3e6m, w = 7.4e-5 rad/s, which gives approximately 5e36 joules. Yearly we need roughly 3e16 Wh. Yeah ok there's plenty. Woah! (also, I may be off by some orders of magnitude)
This is addressed in the last paragraph of the article: > Even if it works, the method will not generate energy from thin air. It would tap Earth’s kinetic energy and, in doing so, cause the planet’s spinning to slow over time — although only slightly. If the technique provided all of Earth’s electricity needs, which was around 11 trillion watts in 2022, this would slow the planet’s spin by 7 milliseconds over the ne…
Really puts how small we are on a cosmic scale into perspective.
If we did it for a million years at current energy use scale it would shorten our day by about 1.1 seconds.