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.

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

The only problem is externality pricing.

Building https://negationgame.com

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

No surprise these are comically negligible in any comprehensible timescale, which is why it’s fun to imagine sci fi solutions for. I like your moon boosters! Maybe we can use lunar solar to convert some mined lunar ice to propulsion to power it.

Idk if you looked at the doc, but it references this paper from a stanford phd that argues the Earth will stop spinning if we use tidal energy. I shared with the guy who runs the RealEngineering YouTube channel and he said it was bullshit

Apparently, the amount of actual deflection of the moon is so little that we could safely harvest tidal forces while having marginal impact on the moon's orbit

Also, kinda cool to think about how you could put boosters on the backside of the moon and then you're effectively "recharging" the moon battery in one place, and then transmitting energy through gravity to every place on Earth twice a day