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My Stupid Question, please don't laugh: If you did this on a massive enough scale, to generate serious amounts of power, would that accidentally slow the Earth's rotation down over time?
I'm not saying that is why we left Mars.
Earlier 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!) Could the waste be 'sent' into space? Bonus points for sending a certain human with it. Serious question, though.
Suggest a hard sci-fi story where humans abuse this so much the Earth basically stops rotating.
The topic is very interesting. The spin of science, is not. Side story: What's to argue over? There's no shortage of scientists with breakthroughs who are pretty much abused by their profession and colleagues, sometimes for decades, simply for exploring possibilities and capabilities that are more than safe and conservative and incremental. Either it's true, or it's not, and it can be explored, or not. Division breed…
A related topic, the emDrive, which had plenty of controversy, is something readers of this thread want to talk about; the specifics are a better fit for this crowd than the meta questions, esp. when vaguely introduced.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The earths rotation creates it. Or was this rhetorical.
No, it was a serious question. Does anything that rotates create a magnetic field even if it is not an electrical material?
The Earth rotates, liquid iron (inside Earth) flows => a current flows in the iron => there is a magnetic field.
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…
Imagine a massive planet spinning in empty vacuum. Can the inhabitants slow down their planet, and generate electricity? 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.
A bad question, as it has been doing that literally (rotationally) since before life started. This power is busy generating the magnetosphere. We would not be enjoying our nice oxygen atmosphere and would be as dead as Mars if Earth's rotation wasn't also powering a dynamo.
It doesn't take any energy to maintain a static magnetic field though.