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coffeeinvenice t1_jbmiand wrote

I read this article on the topic two weeks ago. If I have understood it correctly, it involves extracting energy, from a vacuum, where said energy originally comes from "somewhere else", i.e., somewhere else in the same universe.

If I have understood it correctly, the implications are astounding. It may one day be possible to build machines, batteries or vehicles that are essentially 'self-powered'. The machine extracts energy from the vacuum that originally comes from somewhere else in the universe. Said extraction may cause 'difficulties' in the place of origin of the energy...but if the origin is a star, a galaxy, etc., it's difficult to see how extracting the equivalent of the sum total of all human mechanical activity could significantly affect the state of a galaxy or even a single star. In practice, it could mean access to essentially unlimited (for human purposes) volumes of energy, forever.

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94746382926 t1_jbmyvdh wrote

Now I'm imagining our sun randomly getting extinguished due to aliens somewhere else draining that bitch.

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[deleted] t1_jbn7umn wrote

Or decouple existence faster and faster into an entropic muting because it's actually a vacuum that pulls from another universe, and the more energy that's grabbed from there the more it enforces its universe's stronger deterministic nature and overrides ours into an incompatible atomic cancer.

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coffeeinvenice t1_jbn8wjk wrote

Scale, my man, scale! Imagine if we could pull energy directly from the Sun to use on Earth. It would take longer than the lifespan of the solar system for human needs to draw enough energy from the Sun to have even a 0.1 percent impact on the energy level of the Sun.

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TheIndyCity t1_jbq9efc wrote

Yeah right, this would happen and the following year Nvidia would release their Zero-Point energy graphic cards and we'd be draining the sun in no time.

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UwUin_myOwO t1_jbvvzka wrote

You accidentally blow up one solar system and they never let you hear the end of it!

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Round-Green7348 t1_jbnc2v0 wrote

Imagine the implications for things like space travel if you could siphon power off a few stars and power an absurdly large thruster, without the weight penalty of carrying all of the fuel.

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coffeeinvenice t1_jbnyoe6 wrote

>Imagine the implications for things like space travel if you could siphon power off a few stars and power an absurdly large thruster, without the weight penalty of carrying all of the fuel.

Oh, it means much more than that. Again this depends on whether or not I've understood the article correctly. But if it does become possible to extract energy, from a vacuum, where said energy originally comes from "somewhere else", i.e., somewhere else in the same universe...then fuel itself becomes obsolete.

If you could convert said extracted energy into electricity or hot gases, you could have:

  • Electric road vehicles that never need replacement batteries or charging.

  • Aircraft and jet engines that never need fuel.

  • Virtually unlimited supplies of electricity for residential, commercial and industrial purposes. Including 3-d printing.

  • Virtually unlimited supplies of high-voltage, high temperature arc furnaces to safely incinerate regular garbage and many kinds of hazardous organic waste.

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