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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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Woke_Soul OP t1_jbkxp6x wrote

In simple terms, instead of extracting something from nothing, the energy was "borrowed" from somewhere else, taking advantage of the idea of quantum entanglement, the fact that two subatomic particles can change their state in line with the other, even when the two are separated by a distance.

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AtomGalaxy t1_jblco5k wrote

This is similar to the plot of my favorite Asimov novels:

“The main plot-line is a project by those who inhabit a parallel universe (the para-Universe) with different physical laws from this one. By exchanging matter from their universe—para-Universe—with our universe, they seek to exploit the differences in physical laws. The exchange of matter provides an alternative source of energy to maintain their universe. However, the exchange will likely result in the collapse of the Earth's Sun into a supernova, and possibly even turning a large part of the Milky Way into a quasar. There is hope among those in the para-Universe that the energy explosion does happen in our universe.”

The main plot-line is a project by those who inhabit a parallel universe (the para-Universe) with different physical laws from this one. By exchanging matter from their universe—para-Universe—with our universe, they seek to exploit the differences in physical laws. The exchange of matter provides an alternative source of energy to maintain their universe. However, the exchange will likely result in the collapse of the Earth's Sun into a supernova, and possibly even turning a large part of the Milky Way into a quasar. There is hope among those in the para-Universe that the energy explosion does happen in our universe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gods_Themselves?wprov=sfti1

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yaosio t1_jbmwoiy wrote

That was the plot for a Stargate Atlantis episode. The other universe came over to stop it.

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imakesawdust t1_jbl09jq wrote

So all we need to do is figure out how to transport an entangled particle into another universe and then we can drain that universe of all its energy, staving off the heat-death of our own universe...

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AwesomeDragon97 t1_jbmze98 wrote

I thought that we would do that using interdimensional wormholes and large capacity batteries but this is probably more efficient.

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Captain-Who t1_jbo6ks8 wrote

I’ve seen this one.

We need to overload the heatsink device with a second subspace bridge or we’ll freeze the earth.

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FuturologyBot t1_jbl2t48 wrote

The following submission statement was provided by /u/Woke_Soul:

In simple terms, instead of extracting something from nothing, the energy was "borrowed" from somewhere else, taking advantage of the idea of quantum entanglement, the fact that two subatomic particles can change their state in line with the other, even when the two are separated by a distance.

Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/11n1wwy/researchers_say_they_managed_to_pull_quantum/jbkxp6x/

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wheelontour t1_jbnjgoi wrote

Somewhere in the universe, at the same moment, a star just went out...

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Tnuvu t1_jbnpfwe wrote

Grabbing energy from somewhere else, while being universaly quantum entangled, can lead to all sorts of potential issues, for one, we have no idea, what happens if we try to pull that energy from a star, or better yet, from a collapsing one.

Control is merely an illusion in this part of physics we have no idea still how it works

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Far-Assistance-2505 t1_jbo0c8h wrote

Only somewhat a true vacuum. A true vaccine has truly nothing in it — no matter, no dark matter, no quarks. But this was a good effort.

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SpiritualTwo5256 t1_jbs30qd wrote

It wouldn’t surprise me if they forced the energy to exist so it could be done. The universe is weird like that. Without them trying to do something they wouldn’t find any energy there, but if they tried to find something they will.

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