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

TIL we could turn the moon into a giant battery just by amplifying the tides.