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


KAL 9000

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42 minutes ago, Darnok said:

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.

Do you have any appreciation of the difference between a quantifiable risk and an unquantifiable risk?

Geothermal heat is so many orders of magnitude greater than our baseline energy consumption that we cannot even alter the rate of heat transfer. We can only create channels to route the heat through generators as it goes past us. 

1 hour ago, Sereneti said:

Yes, tschernobyl and fukuschima was a good view about that :)

:P
 

Yes, they were. Because the most massive nuclear accidents in history killed fewer people than coal kills every month. 

You know that even if you include the casualties of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Castle Bravo as victims of "nuclear power", nuclear power is STILL safer than any other energy source? 

Thought experiment: If aliens arrived in Washington DC and offered to give the entire Earth free unlimited energy, with the warning that the flux from their energy source would kill ten humans randomly each day, would you take them up on it?

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Well, this thousand-topicked mess is pretty thoroughly off the rails. 

Say! Why doesn't someone start a thread about silly perpetual motion machine ideas they used to have! That sounds like a fun thing to talk about! 

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