What perpetual motion machine did you design before you learned about thermodynamics?

[Sereneti]

1 hour ago, kerbiloid said:

Just take some uranium stones and make a pile...

a RTG is usefull for long-therm probes... and so on..
Nuklear fuel is very usefull, if its used wise...
Ther are some kind of reaktor that can use the uranium witout enrichment. - they dont be used because they are expensive
Ther are som kind of reaktor that have lot less waste - they arent be used, because the waste is cheap , - the staat take the cost of the waste
The momentan use, its more an abuse then a good use ...
a Fusion Reaktor will get the same problem...

The big  problem of every energy source are the greed of mankind. - a "perpetum mobile" have the same problem.

A RTG can be seen as a perpetum mobile, if you dont know the reason of his heat....

A "perpetum mobile" give us free energy -> use it to ultimo -> some thing we dont know will give us the bill...

[kerbiloid]

4 minutes ago, Sereneti said:

Ther are some kind of reaktor that can use the uranium witout enrichment.

They also need an enriched U or Pu produced in a reactor with enriched uranium. They just add a large amount of non-enriched isotopes as a bulk material.

RTG is just a side product of reactors. A part of its waste enough short-living to be always hot, enough long-living to keep its power for several decades.
All natural RTG fuels decay within several centuries after the supernova explosion where they were born.

[Sereneti]

11 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

They also need an enriched U or Pu produced in a reactor with enriched uranium. They just add a large amount of non-enriched isotopes as a bulk material.

RTG is just a side product of reactors. A part of its waste enough short-living to be always hot, enough long-living to keep its power for several decades.
All natural RTG fuels decay within several centuries after the supernova explosion where they were born.

 a (Presurised) Heavy wather Reaktor can use natural uran.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pressurized_heavy-water_reactor 

but it isnt used in the economy...

there are Natural reaktors too:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor
 
 

Edited May 13, 2016 by Sereneti

[kerbiloid]

7 minutes ago, Sereneti said:

a (Presurised) Heavy wather Reaktor can use natural uran.

Yes, forgot about them.

[cantab]

By the way, I resolved the cat-and-toast idea a long time ago. The cat lands on its feet as normal. At this point the toast hasn't fallen - because it's still tied to the back of the cat! Then Murphy's Law and feline behaviour take effect, and the cat goes to the most expensive furnishing or carpet in the house and rolls over, smearing the butter all over said expensive furnishing as it tries to get free of this thing tied onto it.

[RizzoTheRat]

14 hours ago, RainDreamer said:

Ok, so another idea back when I was young, not really perpetual motion, but crazy power generation idea: A giant solar/thermal power tower. Just a giant tower, with giant disc, coated with solar panel, curved enough to concentrate sunlight toward an superconductor orb in the middle leading straight to steam turbine.

You should have patented the idea

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_tower

[sevenperforce]

7 hours ago, Sereneti said:

before i think about the long-therm-problems, there are enough short-therm problems to avoid that...

there is one city that have huge problems after geothermie...https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebungsrisse_in_Staufen_im_Breisgau
 

That sounds quite unpleasant, but it should be noted that this is a problem with poor civil engineering, not with overuse of a resource.

Globally, you cannot overuse geothermal. Locally, perhaps, but not globally.

7 hours ago, Sereneti said:

Fosil-fuel is a good recource. But its used without thinking.
Nuklear-fuel is a good recource. But its used without thinking.
and so on...

if there is a "perpetum mobile", mankind will (ab)use it, too....
 

Nuclear fuel is not used without thinking. Quite the opposite. It is used sparingly, with a great deal of thought and planning and caution, and it is ignored and maligned without thinking. More education about nuclear power would lead to more use, not less use.

57 minutes ago, RizzoTheRat said:

You should have patented the idea

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_tower

One idea I still think would work well would be an inflatable wind tower that is vertical with a helical turbine. A really, really tall one (15+ km) under a combination of compression and tension. The power it generates allows you to electrolyze and pump in hydrogen gas at the base to replace diffusion losses.

[RainDreamer]

1 hour ago, RizzoTheRat said:

You should have patented the idea

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_tower

Lol, back then I was looking at those giant radar discs and thought it would be pretty neat to turn one of those into green energy generator. The reason it has to be a tower was to also allowing me to attach wind blades on it to use wind power as well, and it would be placed in middle of the sea to use energy from the wave, while using salt water to evaporate and turn the steam turbines, desalinate that water at the same time. 

 

I was a nerdy 13 years old, thinking I could have solved all the world's problems and wondered, "why the heck haven't the adults thought of this". But well, the devil is in the details, and I never figured out how to get all those systems to work together.

[Silver_Swift]

15 hours ago, Darnok said:

Ohh realy so small... like 0.39% of CO2... wait that is not even amount we create.

100/10¹⁵ is not 0.39%, it is 0.00000000001% (that is the correct amount of zeroes, not a hyperbole). Now obviously we want to learn from our mistakes, but I don't think "Using any resource that is not literally infinite is a bad idea" is the lesson we want to learn here.

[Darnok]

10 minutes ago, Silver_Swift said:

100/10¹⁵ is not 0.39%, it is 0.00000000001% (that is the correct amount of zeroes, not a hyperbole). Now obviously we want to learn from our mistakes, but I don't think "Using any resource that is not literally infinite is a bad idea" is the lesson we want to learn here.

Cooling down core of only planet that is capable to sustain life in our solar system is stupid, no matter how many zeros you put there.

[Gaarst]

Just now, Darnok said:

Cooling down core of only planet that is capable to sustain life in our solar system is stupid, no matter how many zeros you put there.

I think you have a problem of scale here.

Humans can do what they want to climate or stuff, but the Earth doesn't even know we're there. The impact of men on the big rock under our feet is literally nothing. Take atom bombs for example: hugely destructive, could cause the extinction on mankind in a few days/weeks, really bad stuff for the planet you might say. Now take earthquakes or volcanoes: each of these is several times more powerful than any atom bomb in terms of energy released, and what are they ? Small movement or holes in the crust leading to the Earth mantle.
Even an asteroid that could wipe out all life on Earth would leave nothing but a small scar. Try finding the Chixclucxub-whatever crater on a map.

Another example that could be more appropriate here: do you fear that Earth is going to fall towards the Sun each time a satellite uses a gravity assist ?

Earth has nothing to fear from a few moving things drilling small holes on its surface. And as long as you do it with a bit of good engineering, neither does mankind.

[Darnok]

11 minutes ago, Gaarst said:

I think you have a problem of scale here.

Humans can do what they want to climate or stuff, but the Earth doesn't even know we're there. The impact of men on the big rock under our feet is literally nothing. Take atom bombs for example: hugely destructive, could cause the extinction on mankind in a few days/weeks, really bad stuff for the planet you might say. Now take earthquakes or volcanoes: each of these is several times more powerful than any atom bomb in terms of energy released, and what are they ? Small movement or holes in the crust leading to the Earth mantle.
Even an asteroid that could wipe out all life on Earth would leave nothing but a small scar. Try finding the Chixclucxub-whatever crater on a map.

Another example that could be more appropriate here: do you fear that Earth is going to fall towards the Sun each time a satellite uses a gravity assist ?

Earth has nothing to fear from a few moving things drilling small holes on its surface. And as long as you do it with a bit of good engineering, neither does mankind.

You know about Earth's magnetic field? Do you really think that making this field weaker is good idea?

As for bombs use one nuke in yellow stone park or tsunami bomb on pacific.

[PB666]

16 minutes ago, Gaarst said:

I think you have a problem of scale here.

Humans can do what they want to climate or stuff, but the Earth doesn't even know we're there. The impact of men on the big rock under our feet is literally nothing. Take atom bombs for example: hugely destructive, could cause the extinction on mankind in a few days/weeks, really bad stuff for the planet you might say. Now take earthquakes or volcanoes: each of these is several times more powerful than any atom bomb in terms of energy released, and what are they ? Small movement or holes in the crust leading to the Earth mantle.
Even an asteroid that could wipe out all life on Earth would leave nothing but a small scar. Try finding the Chixclucxub-whatever crater on a map.

Another example that could be more appropriate here: do you fear that Earth is going to fall towards the Sun each time a satellite uses a gravity assist ?

Earth has nothing to fear from a few moving things drilling small holes on its surface. And as long as you do it with a bit of good engineering, neither does mankind.

Gravity anomaly map of the Chicxulub impact structure.

 

[Sereneti]

look:

1 hour ago, sevenperforce said:

That sounds quite unpleasant, but it should be noted that this is a problem with poor civil engineering, not with overuse of a resource.

Nuclear fuel is not used without thinking. Quite the opposite. It is used sparingly, with a great deal of thought and planning and caution, and it is ignored and maligned without thinking. More education about nuclear power would lead to more use, not less use.

look: in Germany, they store nuklear waste on a Parking-space, - good planing`, caution?

They had lose some Ball.bearing-balls in a pump from a nuklear power-plant. And they had put the pump on again...
(and dont find the Ball-Bearing-balls ..., they are still in the Pump)
good Planing? Caution?

at first they had do a "stress test" of the nuklear power plants...
at first all of the power-plants had failed...
then they reduced the level of the test, until all of the power-plants "survived"...
(they said "all of the power-plants had "survived"...)

Caution?

and so on...
im not against nuklear fuel. But the momentan use , is more an ab-use ...

 

[Sereneti]

1 hour ago, Silver_Swift said:

100/10¹⁵ is not 0.39%, it is 0.00000000001% (that is the correct amount of zeroes, not a hyperbole). Now obviously we want to learn from our mistakes, but I don't think "Using any resource that is not literally infinite is a bad idea" is the lesson we want to learn here.

i wouldnt say that to use a non-infinite recource are a bad idea, - but to use it without thinking are one.
look, the oil - oil can be used to make medicine, alkohol and a lot of good stuff.
but we burn it...

Look at the plastik:
We could make oil from that, use it to energy...
but we trow it into the ocean......

there are other problems with the renewable energy:
Wind - they are using rare-earth magnets for the Wind-power-plants....
Biofuel: They are using a lot of Syntetic Fertilizer, and a lot of phosphor-fertilizer to grow up the plants for Biofuel -> it takes more recources to make Biofuel than to make Gasoline...
(and if we run out of phosphor, we ran into big problems...)

and so on...
there are a lot of big problems, Problems that are caused by "Greed"

[sevenperforce]

59 minutes ago, Darnok said:

You know about Earth's magnetic field? Do you really think that making this field weaker is good idea?

How do you imagine that any human activity could have a measurable impact on the Earth's magnetic field? Our magnetic field regularly fluxes and reverses on energy scales that dwarf the entire cumulative energy consumption of humanity by orders of magnitude.

1 hour ago, Darnok said:

As for bombs use one nuke in yellow stone park...

One nuke in Yellowstone Park wouldn't do a thing. You'd have to dig a massive shaft five miles deep, fill it with water so that it would transfer the shockwave more efficiently, and then lower a several-dozen-megaton nuke to the bottom. But after the dust cleared and all life was extinguished, Earth would continue to spin without any appreciable change in the amount of heat it generates. 

56 minutes ago, PB666 said:

Gravity anomaly map of the Chicxulub impact structure.

 

To be fair, I assume Gaarst was talking about what you can see on an unmarked map of the surface topography...

28 minutes ago, Sereneti said:

look: in Germany, they store nuklear waste on a Parking-space, - good planing`, caution?

They had lose some Ball.bearing-balls in a pump from a nuklear power-plant. And they had put the pump on again...
(and dont find the Ball-Bearing-balls ..., they are still in the Pump)
good Planing? Caution?

at first they had do a "stress test" of the nuklear power plants...
at first all of the power-plants had failed...
then they reduced the level of the test, until all of the power-plants "survived"...
(they said "all of the power-plants had "survived"...)

Caution?

As someone who works in certification and testing, an anecdote about "reducing the level of the stress test" really doesn't mean much to me. Those sorts of things are rather complicated.

Nuclear power is simply so much safer than any other energy source that it's stupid.

[Sereneti]

7 minutes ago, sevenperforce said:

Nuclear power is simply so much safer than any other energy source that it's stupid.

Yes, tschernobyl and fukuschima was a good view about that


 

[PB666]

3 minutes ago, sevenperforce said:

To be fair, I assume Gaarst was talking about what you can see on an unmarked map of the surface topography...

2/3rds of the crater is under water, the other 1/3 is in fairly dense jungle, and relatively poor isolated region, where megalithic stone structures have gotten lost.

Quote

He then obtained a gravity map of the Yucatán made in the 1960s. A decade earlier, the same map suggested an impact feature to contractor Robert Baltosser, but he was forbidden to publicize his conclusion by Pemex corporate policy of the time.  . . . . . .

Pemex disallowed release of specific data but let Penfield and company official Antonio Camargo present their results at the 1981 Society of Exploration Geophysicists conference.

-wiki [] crater

Its kind of hard to map something accurately when the State owned company which serendipitously identifies the surface anomalies then makes it impossible to publish. In the 1960s if some official tells you not to do something, its best not to do it, thereafter the rio bravo would be your southern extent of travel.

It would be like Jefferson telling Lewis and Clark to detail investigations of the Missouri river, but do not describe any of the native tribes living along the route.

"In 1990, Houston Chronicle reporter Carlos Byars told Hildebrand of Penfield's earlier discovery of a possible impact crater" ,  I should note that the core samples were not sampled originally from Mexico but from a stock stored in a testing lab in New Orleans from 1951, had that not been the case we might have had to wait another 20 years.

If they are relying on the Houston chronicle to break 35 year old scientific discovery, pretty good chance that the science has not had a good venue of expression.

[Gaarst]

1 hour ago, Darnok said:

You know about Earth's magnetic field? Do you really think that making this field weaker is good idea?

As for bombs use one nuke in yellow stone park or tsunami bomb on pacific.

Because digging a few holes hundreds of meters deep will stop the rotation of a 2000km wide ball of molten metal 4000km further down...

As @sevenperforce said a nuclear bomb in the Yellowstone won't probably do that much damage to the Earth even if the whole thing blew up.
And we have detonated several dozen H bombs for underwater tests are we are not living with the fishes^{[citation needed]} as far as I'm aware of.

1 hour ago, PB666 said:

Gravity anomaly map of the Chicxulub impact structure.

I don't want you to take a map with a big red circle on it and say "it's at the place of the big red circle". Take an actual map (or Google Earth if you want) and go find that crater without any indication of its location.

And you will find... nothing. Because even something that can wipe out all life from Earth doesn't do anything to the planet itself.

Edited May 13, 2016 by Gaarst

[AngelLestat]

I guess when we think in energy, we should always had in mind its source and the cost, for example:

Source SUN (Fusion)

1-Solar (electromagnetic)
2-Wind (kinetic)
3-Hydropower (gravity potential)
4-Sea Waves or currents (kinetic)
5-Fossil fuels (chemical storage)

Source Moon´s gravity.

1-Tidal power (kinetic)

Source Geothermal (50 to 90 % Radioactive decay, rest remaining heat from earth creation and a small % of tidal heat)

1-Geothermal Energy

Source Nuclear (hard to classify)

1- RTG 
2- Fission
3- Fusion  (future)

Then to exploit those we always have a cost associated, for example we can travel around the world with "solar impulse 2 plane" in something that we might call "perpetual motion" (of course is not), but it require a lot of money, based on the amount of work needed (that is also related to energy).

I never try to defeat thermodynamics, but there are times when you don't know exactly if the extra efficiency you looking to achieve is against some rule or not.  

This is an energy scheme that I wanted to exploit (the image is not complete):
 

The goal:  try to improve the efficiency of wind energy with chemical storage and other energy sources.
1- Extra heat energy from black smokers to improve the efficiency of electrolysis (above 100% measured from the electrical input)
2- Extra efficiency in work with high pressure electrolysis (this is only related to limitations of our current electrolysis tech methods, not due physics rules, gravity is a conservative field)
3- Don't waste the gravity potential that we can get rising the hydrogen.
4- Extra energy from waves that you need to absorb to reduce the movement of your floating base.
5- Instead normal wind turbines, remplace them with high altitude kites (kitegen style), which it will increase the capacity factor and reduce floating structure.
6- Make the kite rope conductive using CNT so you can harvester the atmosphere electrostatic and lightnings, which can all help to increase the voltage and heat to produce extra hydrogen.
7- Extra fishing and co2 capture due the amount of nutrients you can get rising all that cold water with the option C.

The bigger problem is the maintenance cost, I guess there is no material that can resist all that for so long.
Also the cost to purify water, in case you don't want to separate and mine all extra elements from the water, but if you use a black smoker in the first place, mine those minerals has total sense.

Edited May 13, 2016 by AngelLestat

[Darnok]

40 minutes ago, sevenperforce said:

How do you imagine that any human activity could have a measurable impact on the Earth's magnetic field? Our magnetic field regularly fluxes and reverses on energy scales that dwarf the entire cumulative energy consumption of humanity by orders of magnitude.

 

Today.

Many years ago we burned amount of fossil fuels with same ratio... orders of magnitude less than we could make any impact on atmosphere and today some people are saying about climate change and same people are saying that taking energy from Earth's core won't have harmful impact on Earth... that is really interesting opinion. The problem is that when we notice what is our impact on core it might be too late.

[PB666]

1 minute ago, Gaarst said:

@sevenperforce

I don't want you to take a map with a big red circle on it and say "it's at the place of the big red circle". Take an actual map (or Google Earth if you want) and go find that crater without any indication of its location.

OK, But the center of the crater is not a surface feature, its underwater.

Second, as a scientist we are not third or forth-eye blind, our instruments are our eyes, so there is not logic in blinding ourselves for the sake of ad absurdum arguments.

https://www.google.com/maps/@20.762659,-89.2792164,59042m/data=!3m1!1e3?hl=en

 

See the lighter colored vegetation that make the arc. Theres a road that sits right on the rise, thats because parts of the region are subject to severe prolonged flooding every few decades.

https://www.google.com/maps/@20.6368447,-89.6037423,29546m/data=!3m1!1e3?hl=en

BTW, the crater itself is under mud, that was 66 million years ago in an area with appreciable rainfall and volcanism. There is a trough behind the rise, this is the red line on the map, but difficult to see because of the dense vegetation. As said in the Northern Yucatan you don't build roads and cities in the low lying areas because they tend to flood for weeks at a time during periods of heavy rain.

If you scour the Google maps of the Yucatan you can find the various troughs and rise that the volcano left. These are not the actual rises, the surface topology is forced be the ripples in the fused silicates left in the craters wake, these surface features erode less quickly and thus are secondary evidence.

Yellowstone is a massive volcano, its not obvious from ground maps either, its only really obvious from distal perspectives. We easily see craters on the moon from 225,000 miles, so one should expect really big volcanos and impact craters would be most visible from space.

[wumpus]

To be semi-close to the topic, I can't seem to remember any perpetual motion devices I was sure would work (there must have been some I thought up, but never really sure).  A similar impossibility is a "general purpose compression device": i.e. a device that for any type of data returns a smaller amount of data.  These are obviously mathematically impossible (google "pigeonhole principle" if you can't figure out the proof yourself.  Note: understanding that proof is a great test if you understand base 2 math and boolean logic).

No, I didn't try to build a "general purpose compression device" (I understood it was impossible roughly when I understood how compression worked).  I was trying to design some sort of error correcting system that would allow more efficient transmission of the data.  Unfortunately, when I was having all sorts of trouble finding the last piece I needed for the code I realized that the code I was expecting could be invariably compressed smaller than the original data.  This was bad.  I still think the original idea can work, but the benefits will be rather tiny (may or may not be worth pursuing).

[Gaarst]

5 minutes ago, PB666 said:

OK, But the center of the crater is not a surface feature, its underwater.

Second, as a scientist we are not third or forth-eye blind, our instruments are our eyes, so there is not logic in blinding ourselves for the sake of ad absurdum arguments.

https://www.google.com/maps/@20.762659,-89.2792164,59042m/data=!3m1!1e3?hl=en

 

See the lighter colored vegetation that make the arc. Theres a road that sits right on the rise, thats because parts of the region are subject to severe prolonged flooding every few decades.

https://www.google.com/maps/@20.6368447,-89.6037423,29546m/data=!3m1!1e3?hl=en

BTW, the crater itself is under mud, that was 66 million years ago in an area with appreciable rainfall and volcanism. There is a trough behind the rise, this is the red line on the map, but difficult to see because of the dense vegetation. As said in the Northern Yucatan you don't build roads and cities in the low lying areas because they tend to flood for weeks at a time during periods of heavy rain.

If you scour the Google maps of the Yucatan you can find the various troughs and rise that the volcano left. These are not the actual rises, the surface topology is forced be the ripples in the fused silicates left in the craters wake, these surface features erode less quickly and thus are secondary evidence.

Yellowstone is a massive volcano, its not obvious from ground maps either, its only really obvious from distal perspectives. We easily see craters on the moon from 225,000 miles, so one should expect really big volcanos and impact craters would be most visible from space.

Of course it is there and you can see it with the appropriate instruments, but it is not obvious at first sight. My point was to show the difference in scales between man and the Earth, showing that such a destructive event for life leaves only small local marks and has no global impact on the Earth whatsoever. Same goes for Yellowstone.

Anyway, we're really going off topic there, so we should stop the whole argument about whether geothermal is renewable or not (it is ).

[PB666]

1 minute ago, Gaarst said:

Of course it is there and you can see it with the appropriate instruments, but it is not obvious at first sight. My point was to show the difference in scales between man and the Earth, showing that such a destructive event for life leaves only small local marks and has no global impact on the Earth whatsoever. Same goes for Yellowstone.

Anyway, we're really going off topic there, so we should stop the whole argument about whether geothermal is renewable or not (it is ).

Of course Yellowstone Geo is renewable, the OP was being obsessive, but on Earth one has to take the evidence one gets, not the evidence one wants, the moon, other than bombardment is sterile, the Earth is very vibrant, so the tell-tale signs of anything are not evident after 66 million years.  Look at the South America Africa drift argument, rather obvious from space, people traveling in the 16th century were alltogether unaware of the common origin.

Like wise the impact was a deep crustal upper mantle event, no doubt about that, it shape the Yucatan in ways we cannot even imagine, that is the problem. Its hard to backtrack 66 million years concerning flood plans, volcanism created, alteration of reefs, liquifation and causes for sedement increases in some areas and decreases in others. All of these things are interpretive realities.