Engineering

creating and destroying; built flying cars & autonomous vehicles, now building /faust, more here: /july, web: july.rocks

When I was a kid, I had the idea of drawing energy from the tides and thought I might have cleverly invented a perpetual motion machine, because hey, free energy forever.

But of course, the downside is that the device pulls energy from the Earth-Moon coupling, contributing ever so negligibly to the Moon pulling away from the Earth (right now, by about one inch per year).

That’s how I learned there’s not free lunch and the laws of thermodynamics are as inescapable as death, taxes, and @july casting interesting content

I love this. It makes perfect sense that there's no free lunch, even from the tides. The moon's distance like a battery charge.

I explored this idea a while ago with a floating structure that you affix to the sea floor

co founder of @metamask . Making computers behave for us.

The only problem is externality pricing.

Building https://negationgame.com

Only renewable if we regularly get new moons, apparently. 😜

I explored this idea a while ago with a floating structure that you affix to the sea floor

https://coda.io/@connor/renewable-tidal-battery

Free energy is everywhere, it's just the cost of harvesting. Earth rotation, moon, solar - solar energy is free and sends unbelievable amounts of energy to earth, the main issue is building something to turn it into electricity. 
Tides don't work well because the ocean is a hostile environment to mechanics. Same with wind.