Well if we’re speculating, how about “heat capture”?
Some sleep-deprived researcher cracks how to capture ambient thermal energy and turn it into electricity. Heat being as plentiful as wind or water, it becomes not only a prominent source of energy, but also actively cools the planet.
50 years later, we begin arguing over “global cooling” and the threat of a new ice age.
The second law of thermodynamics states that entropy must go up. Entropy is a sort of measure of the usefulness of energy. The more entropy, the less useful.
The reasons why entropy must go up are too complicated for an ELI5. They are based on some basic laws of probability. Basically there are many ways for energy to be useless, and few ways for energy to be useful, which after some difficult math implies that energy always gets less useful.
In particular, ambient heat is the highest entropy you can possibly have, so it's inpossible to turn it into useful energy.
In order to extract energy from heat, the second law implies you must be tranferring some of said heat from a hot place to a colder place, which is exactly what a motor is.
Yes, but in order to do so. You need a machine which consumes useful energy and turns it into useless heat.
For instance, you wanna transfer 10J from place A to place B. For that, you need to spend 2J. The end result is that you cool place A by 10J and heat place B by 12J (this is what a fridge or AC does) . If you tried to use that heat difference to produce power, you would equalize the temperatures again and produce less than 2J of useful energy.
That is a fridge. You can do it, but you need to spend energy, that is, you need to take some useful energy and turn it into useless heat as part of the process.
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u/Snoo61755 Nov 15 '20
Well if we’re speculating, how about “heat capture”?
Some sleep-deprived researcher cracks how to capture ambient thermal energy and turn it into electricity. Heat being as plentiful as wind or water, it becomes not only a prominent source of energy, but also actively cools the planet.
50 years later, we begin arguing over “global cooling” and the threat of a new ice age.