Scientists announce perpetual motion energy machine. But they need more government money to make it work. This could be worth BILLIONS !!!!!

Image above - how unlimited free energy will be created, according to one company.

I am glad I didn’t graduate from college with a STEM degree. Imagine having to explain to my family that I’m writing federal grant applications to create the worlds first perpetual motion machine. Or working on new Pentagon weapons. I sleep better at night having an honest job.

The links below are to a secretive corporation called “Spectral Sensor Solutions”. It’s not only a defense contractor but also claims to have invented a free energy machine. But the company has no Wikipedia page, and their own website hilariously opaque about what they're doing with the government grants they already get. “Lasers” are hinted at.

We’ve been promised unlimited energy before. Nuclear power was supposedly going to be so cheap we wouldn’t even need electric meters. Tapping just 3% of the sun’s rays would generate an order of magnitude more electricity than we could ever use. Wind turbines would more than pick up the slack after sunset. Not to mention cold fusion, hot fusion, turning switchgrass into gasoline, turning used French fry oil into diesel, tidal energy . . .

Everything listed above failed to live up to some overblown promise. Most of them are expensive, require exotic minerals which are scarce, or have a huge footprint. If these things actually lived up to their promise, we wouldn’t be looking to get free energy from harnessing the earth’s rotation.

The scientists involved promise – they PROMISE – that with enough taxpayer support, they can make it better than nuclear, fusion, solar, wind, tidal, hydrogen, and capturing moonbeams with magic crystals.

Here is how harnessing the earth’s rotation is supposed to work (exact quote from their press release): “make a cylinder of manganese-zinc ferrite, a weakly conducting material known for its magnetic shielding properties. Then you align the cylinder along a north–south axis, but you tilt it a 57-degree angle. This makes the cylinder harmonious with both the earth’s rotation AND magnetic field”. Once you do all that, you get free electricity.

But Spectral Sensor Solutions doesn’t have any photos of this amazing device. Not even an AI generated mockup. All they have is a cartoon. See image at top, pasted from their press release. If you gave me 2 minutes time Midjourney, I could come up with something snazzier and more believable.

Reminder to congress and the White House: free energy and perpetual motion machines are impossible due to the laws of physics. (Thank you for decades of work Einstein, Erwin Schrodinger, Nils Bohr, and Max Planck). There’s no free lunch, no matter what the guys at Spectral Sensor Solutions claim.

I’m a cynic and skeptic and about government grants. America spends trillions on weapons, but we lose wars to ragtag armies like the Taliban in Afghanistan. We’re still subsiding people to buy solar panels and EV batteries and windmills because they’re ridiculously expensive. And after a couple of decades those gizmos will need to be recycled, something we haven’t figured out how to do yet. Dumping those 300 foot long wind turbine blades offshore to make artificial reefs is their best idea so far.

So, my theory is that if America builds a bunch of these mysterious manganese-zinc-ferrite cylinders, not only will it be astonishingly expensive, it might require a footprint the size of Greenland. Or slow down the earth’s rotation. Or sap the planet’s magnetic field. Watch various Hollywood disaster films if you want see what happens then.

Sorry, but I have to turn down your grant request, Spectral Sensor Solutions and Princeton University. We already have a bunch of energy miracles and weapons that never lived up to their promise. And a $37 Trillion national debt to prove it.

I’m just sayin’ . . .

This Tiny Device Generates Power From the Earth’s Spin (PR claim)

Experimental demonstration of electric power generation from Earth's rotation through its own magnetic field | Phys. Rev. Research (full research paper)

Spectral Sensor Solutions - Home (official company website)

thrash · 31-35, M

even if this method could work on a small scale, the practicality of scaling it up to generate significant, useful amounts of power is questionable. the technology would require massive infrastructure, likely with global consequences - slowing the earth's rotation, affecting its magnetic field, or requiring an unrealistic amount of resources and space.

investing in massive solar panels is similar in that it also requires large amounts of space and resources to generate meaningful power, though it doesn’t come with the same potential global side effects.

ElwoodBlues · M

@thrash Not really that much land area needed to power the US with 100% solar. It works out to a square about 100 miles on a side. But of course it makes more sense to distribute solar collectors widely.

For comparison, google says roadways, including state highways, cover an estimated 3.6% of the land area in the United States, with a quarter of urbanized land dedicated to roadways.

Another source: There are over 1.2 million miles of roads in the US, with a corresponding estimate of 4 million hectare—or nearly 10 million acres—of roadside ROW land. Of those, about 600,000 miles are highways and other major roads managed by states.
https://rockinst.org/blog/all-the-above-the-many-ways-to-use-roadside-right-of-ways/

In other words, roadside right-of-way on state and federal highways is nearly enough land to accommodate the necessary solar panels.

SusanInFlorida · 31-35, F

@thrash that was the point in my post. creating a "cylinder farm" is going to end up like creating a solar farm, and wind farm, etc. massive footprint.

there's no free lunch