Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[LordBucket]

It outputs 5% more energy than it gets in, which is hard set at a maximum. And given it would apparently be pretty big, I don't see it being used as an explosive any time soon. More likely there'd be arrays of them built for specific purposes, like charging electric cars and other stuff that isn't particularly time-critical.

PowerOut = PowerIn * 1.05

If you feed a steady 100 in, you get a steady 105 out. But what happens if instead of feeding it a constant PowerIn, you feed it the exponentially growing PowerOut?

This is why the device vaporized in the initial example. The only reason Egan_BW's end-of-the-universe scenario doesn't happen is that again, the device would tend to destroy itself due to overload.

[Graknorke]

Oh, the way you worded it I thought it was a flat 100W in, 105W out.

[Reelya]

I foresee an integration in world military and economy, and a vaaaaast increase in international tension before anything could be expected to be even semi-permanently positive coming out of it.

If something positive comes out of it.  We all know that some asshole will make a bomb out of the machine and ruin it for the rest of us.

Actually, energy self-sufficiency could actually ease international tensions rather than increase them. There would be no more need to deploy stratetic military force to control energy supplies - which has historically been for at least two reasons: to secure energy for your own country, and control energy supplies to rival counties.

Oil nations would see much less military aid / military support from the big powers, and they would also see their main export crash in price. Sure, this would lead to instability in the oil nations, and you'd see a lot of pupper dictator regimes imploding, but is unlikely to trigger widespread wars. In these cases they've lost both the resources and reason to fight. These smaller nations definitely need at least one major power to be a backer in any international war. But that aid is unlikely to be forthcoming when your value as a nation has plummeted to zero: nobody is going to back Saudi Arabia if oil plummets to being worthless.

So, the nations that will rise are those who make things that people actually want, thus countries that rely on energy resources would become irrelevant and they would have to reinvent their economies from scratch. They will be unlikely to strike out at other nations as they will be too weak to do so vs the other countries who's economies and industry will be booming at this time.

[Bumber]

Considering it only killed one guy due to toxicity and didn't even explode his entire block, the risks seem minimal. It could probably be used to charge a large capacitor, which would then feed a limited current back into the device.

I'm more worried about the consequences to the Law of Conservation of Energy. Then again, screw the rules we have interstellar travel. The energy can be used to make matter. Might have a heat dissipation problem however, even on earth after a while.

Can the energy be fed into the device backwards to get rid of it? (And more importantly, can I now drive my car walk backwards to decrease my mileage? )

[hops]

If we can break the law of conservation of energy, then we'd be able to create matters out of nothing, and if it is possible to do that then the only sole limiting factor would be time, thus time would become the most valuable commodity.

[i2amroy]

The thing is that only an idiot would straight wire the output to the input without a regulator there. In an ideal situation you'd be running a constant in/out equals to 20x your edited power consumption, meaning you wouldn't be costing anything. With just a bit of wiring you could have something that automatically scaled the power flowing through the device up or down to constantly maintain a level equal to 20x your desired load.

Really a lot of what would be done depends on the size of the device. A big problem I a lot of the more awesome technologies we're currently developing (power armor, invisibility cloaks, etc) isn't that they don't work, but the simple fact that they either require being hooked to a big huge generator or need to be recharged every 10 minutes. If our device is small enough to carry, that opens up a whole new level of technology that we just couldn't feasibly power before.

Also space travel. We've already got a few designs for space elevators or similar launchers that just consume constant electric power instead of requiring absurd materials to build, and our device plus an impulse engine means huge decreases in weight requirements for space craft.

Lastly we'd no longer necessarily need to suffer the end of the universe, because infinite usable energy lets you reverse entropy and other universe destroying factors through adequate energy supplements to the right places in the right ways.

[iceball3]

Considering it only killed one guy due to toxicity and didn't even explode his entire block, the risks seem minimal. It could probably be used to charge a large capacitor, which would then feed a limited current back into the device.

I'm more worried about the consequences to the Law of Conservation of Energy. Then again, screw the rules we have interstellar travel. The energy can be used to make matter. Might have a heat dissipation problem however, even on earth after a while.

Can the energy be fed into the device backwards to get rid of it? (And more importantly, can I now drive my car walk backwards to decrease my mileage? )

You could probably rid of the excess energy by grounding it. The problem in the long term would be the earth gradually becoming positively/negatively charged-- wait.
Is the machine AC or DC powered? Does it create more electrons/obliterate electrons or just move them?

[MrWiggles]

who are those mysterious oil barons that would prevent this thing from getting into open market yet would allow coal/gas/hydro/thermal/nuclear/solar power stations to exist?

Simple.  Those don't make gasoline-based cars obsolete by making electric-based models so much more viable/cheaper/etc.

Gasoline cars are going the way of the dodo. There nothing that these all powerful illumanti like oil barons can do about it.

[Reelya]

New barons rise up to replace the old obselete ones. These days it's bit barons.

[MrWiggles]

I dont know where you're going with this, Reelya. At first it seem like you supporting a grand intricate conspiracy to stop the eventual success of electrical cars.

[Reelya]

Reading much into a sentence?

The entire setence was just pointing out how guys like Bill Gates are the "barons" now. He is the richest man in the world after all, and he was neck and neck with a Mexican guy who owns are huge telecommunication firm for a while. The guys who sell "bits" i.e. software and communications are the top now, not oil.

saying "these days it's bit barons" :-

(1) does not "support" anything, it's just a statement of the way things are

(2) it doesn't imply there's a "conspiracy", large or small

(3) has nothing to do with "cars", electrical or otherwise.

And to top of how incoherent that reply was:

(4) Why would said "bit barons" be involved in a huge conspiracy to stop electric cars? Surely, that's what the oil barons want, and I just said they're obselete.

[wierd]

I love how you guys immediately jump the gun on over-unity==violates conservation of energy==OMG, The solar system is ON FIRE.

Especially since small scale over-unity *IS* possible--  Specially tuned semiconductors that have "almost enough voltage" to activate the band gap and become conductive, are able to make use of thermal noise to produce electron/hole pairs (and thus begin pushing a current in addition to the supplied current), with the consequence of the semiconductor absorbing heat.

There's also this fun little thing about LEDs at low voltages, where they emit more light energy than they take in as source power, when the voltages are very very low.


You dont need to violate conservation of energy. local violations of second law of thermodynamics is enough. (Over-unity LEDs simply EXISTING indicates this latter is theoretically achievable.)


Things would probably get even more interesting at the nano-scale, since it is easier to capitalize on these kinds of effects at those scales.  Improvements in 3D semiconductor fabrication, along with very tiny lithography techniques (down to 14nm process now, IIRC.) could enable such heat-absorbing devices to be run in parallel on a very large chip, to get useful current at low voltages-- Passing that through a DC-DC converter to get higher voltages at the expense of current, useful electrical signals could be potentially be generated reasonably efficiently (better than thermocouples anyway), and thus a car that runs on ambient heat could well become a reality some day.

[sneakey pete]

Those discussing the effects on it blowing up deterring people etc..

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Science!

[Arx]

I love how you guys immediately jump the gun on over-unity==violates conservation of energy==OMG, The solar system is ON FIRE.

Well, LordBucket does refer to it as free energy, so it's entirely reasonable (especially in the context of a hypothetical situation). It's not a case of 'imagine we could tap the device's waste heat and internal energy to make it work more efficiently' (i.e. the equivalent of 'imagine we had a slightly better kind of generator'), it's 'imagine we can literally make energy from nothing'.

[LordBucket]

The scenario in the OP was explicitly intended to be one where conservation of energy was broken in the local frame of reference, within a closed system, at a significant macroscopic scale.