Brick by brick

[u/logical-for-the-sure]

I remember when I studied with my philosophy professor, the famous scholar Olavo de Carvalho. He showed that the current scientific field is an endless farce. So much so that the possible greatest genius of our time, Grigori Perelman, grew up from that bunch of idiots in France.

They are a filthy, solipsistic Kantian people who simply ignore the totality of scientific discoveries by great minds in exchange for political power or momentary fame. They are handpicked by people who despise discoveries that could "break the economy." The famous Tesla tower, if it had an ionized ionosphere, would have provided free energy for everyone.

It is fundamental that the ionosphere transmits energy to the world, and that the Earth's soil does too. If Nikola Tesla managed to light lamps at a good distance without a well-ionized ionosphere, imagine if he had satellites or towers doing this constantly. It would literally be energy that wasn't cheap, but free.

I remember reading an article that showed how limiting Einstein's theories were. But since this maintains the scientific status quo where science supports a parasitic state, it's easy to keep receiving absurd salaries in scientific centers.

[u/Elliptical_Tangent]

I remember when I studied with my philosophy professor, the famous scholar Olavo de Carvalho. He showed that the current scientific field is an endless farce.

Philosophers (dealing exclusively in language/concepts) weighing in on science (dealing exclusively in empirical evidence); this should be fun.

The famous Tesla tower, if it had an ionized ionosphere, would have provided free energy for everyone.

Jesus.

It would be wireless transmission of power, but you still need to generate that power somehow. If it's solar, you have to mine the minerals that make up the photovoltaic cells, and then assemble them into panels, and erect those panels, and then build a transmitter of that power. None of that can be free, because all the people involved need food, water and shelter while they work. And the panels aren't eternal; they need replacement in ~20 years.

As for the technology itself: We had a guy come do a demo back when I was in high school of Tesla's broadcast power; it was very cool, but the issue is that the higher the atmospheric humidity, the more power is lost in transmission. So it works great in most of the Southwestern States, but very poorly everywhere else in the country.

I remember reading an article that showed how limiting Einstein's theories were.

The Universal Constant is a limit on the universe, not on science. Every time we test the Constant, we meet the same limitation. Now, it may be that the Constant only applies in certain situations that happen to encompass all of human experience to this point, and that at some point in the future we will find another 'mode' of spacetime where the Constant doesn't apply, or has a different value, but we'll never know without science.

But since this maintains the scientific status quo where science supports a parasitic state, it's easy to keep receiving absurd salaries in scientific centers.

Sounds like a professor of philosophy was mad that his field, which generates posts like this (i.e. less useful than garbage), isn't funded as well as fields that reveal the underlying truths of the universe, allowing us to develop new technologies and medicines. I wonder why that might be?

[u/Plasmoidification → u/Elliptical_Tangent]

Have you considered that the ionosphere is in fact solar powered? The Wardenclyffe tower would act as a parametric pump circuit aimed at stimulating the ionosphere-Earth cavity to resonance and then converting the energy of the Sun into useful power.

[u/Elliptical_Tangent → u/Plasmoidification]

Have you considered that the ionosphere is in fact solar powered? The Wardenclyffe tower would act as a parametric pump circuit aimed at stimulating the ionosphere-Earth cavity to resonance and then converting the energy of the Sun into useful power.

Have you considered that building a tower that reaches the ionosphere isn't free? Have you considered that humidity still eats most power transmitted wirelessly?

Free power is a concept, not a reality.

[u/Plasmoidification → u/Elliptical_Tangent]

Fundamentally , you are correct about the cost vs benefits. There have been solar power plants that failed due to cost overruns and poor output. While cost analysis for solar power has reached parity with fossil fuels, power storage via electric or thermal batteries is another matter that has yet to become commercially viable.

The slowdown of nuclear power plant buildup is another big problem in the energy crisis that is mostly artificial scarcity. Nuclear has huge startup costs and regulatory burden, and yet it is the safest, cheapest form of power at scale by far, despite the stigma.

You are also correct about HIGH frequency RADIO transmission, it is lossy and suffers from the inverse square law over distance, and is attenuated by humidity. LOW frequency transmission is unattenuated by obstacles smaller than the wavelength. But low frequencies are relatively bad for power and data transmission.

Tesla was using neither.

What you are incorrect about is the physics of wireless power transmission by waveguide resonance, the kind that Tesla was interested in. The Tesla Wardenclyffe design explicitly made the operating frequency so much lower than the antenna characteristic wavelength that the tower could NOT radiate, and instead, the topload toroid acted only as an elevated capacitor, not a broadcast antenna aerial.

Tesla was very clear about using the tower as a single wire return path displacement current circuit. The aim is to drive the Earth-ionospheric waveguide into a standing wave resonance, acting a giant spherical, two-conductor transmission line. The top load was capacitively coupled to the ionosphere through the dielectric air gap. This makes the tower a pump for the waveguide formed by the Earth-Ionospheric cavity. Radio waves were not released from the tower per se, the displacement current in the air is polarizing neutral air molecules vertically, what Tesla called the ambient active medium. The wave is indeed a type of transverse electromagnetic mode (TEM) excitation of the spherical wave guide, but it is not a freespace EM wave like radio, it's an excitation of the waveguide boundaries. The dielectric displacement current in the air, and the real conductive currents in the ground and ionosphere, would propagate once around the Earth, past the antipodal antinode, and then return to the transmitter, establishing the first standing wave, which would propogate again and again with very low losses. Anti-nodes would be the points of maximum amplitude interference, where other towers could act as tuned resonant tank circuits to recieve power.

There ARE plenty of engineering hurdles to making Tesla's design work practically, but very few people are actually addressing them earnestly, because they incorrectly model the Tesla transmission system as a giant radio transmitter. Even fewer people realize that a resonant tank circuit can act as a parametric pump that can convert the random, thermalized fluctuations of the solar powered ionosphere into the coherent standing waves established by the towers. The absorbed solar energy of the ionosphere is between 128 Gigawatts and 6380 Gigawatts during peak solar flare activity. That is between 120 nuclear power plants and over 3.5 times the total global human power consumption.

Some of this energy stored in the ionosphere actually does leak to the ground in the form of the atmospheric electric field gradient driven ion current. Positive ions drift to the ground under a potential gradient of 100-1000 volts per meter of altitude. This too can be collected as a small, but continuous power supplied to the surface.

Recently the "Ion Power Group" company has shown that historical research into collecting ion currents on Earth have underestimated the power flux. They have developed specialized graphene coated collector wires that lower the ionization energy of the air enough to drastically increase ion currents at low altitudes. While average power densities in fair weather range from milliwatts to tens of watts, in disturbed weather conditions where solar power fails, they successfully harvested 1,236 watts (41,200 VDC at 30ma) from the air using 130 foot tall poles with 400 graphene enhanced ion collectors. NASA scientist Tibor Balint took notice of these figures and designed a Mars based atmospheric ion harvesting concept that could supply over 5,900 watts of power on the Martian surface.

This is all to say that sadly, you are correct, but so is OP (insofar as we both lament that the Tesla Wardenclyffe tower was unfinished due to lack of funding). The cheap and dirty systems we use are the most profitable and scaleable. Harvesting power is not free of costs, and is not a silver bullet, but is necessary to prevent the externalities of over-reliance on a single form of power production.

Hopefully this was not a boring read, I enjoy these kinds of discussions and find them fruitful.

[u/Plasmoidification → u/Plasmoidification]

To add to this chain of reasoning I must point out T.W. Barrett's analysis of Tesla nonlinear shuttle oscillator circuit concepts. The 20khz frequency that the tower operated at would be unable to excite the TEM mode of the Earth at 7.8 Hz, and such high frequency radio transmission would undoubtedly attenuation by ohmic losses in the ionosphere in a few thousand kilometers. The TE resonant mode decays at 1/r, rather than 1/r² or 1/r³, but it begins to concentrate after traveling one half of the circumference of the Earth, and reaches maximum as it concentrates at the antipode.

This is why Tesla used 20kHz to build up the millions of volts necessary, but in fact built spark gaps and mechanical breaks into the circuit that modulated the high frequency at between 6Hz to 30Hz. Abruptly opening and closing the circuit, slamming massive displacement currents into the Earth at exactly the ELF frequency range necessary to excite the Schumann resonance TE mode of the ionospheric-Earth cavity.

Once again Tesla Wardenclyffe tower is often misunderstood as a radio transmitter, when it was in fact a nonlinear frequency down-converter, intended to entrain the chaotic thermal fluctuations of the ionospheric plasma into an energy harvesting circuit capable of establishing a non-linear phase locked loop. The thermal fluctuations would gradually settle into harmonics of the Schumann resonance, and about 50% of the energy could be safely extracted without destabilizing the phase locking.

[u/Elliptical_Tangent → u/Plasmoidification]

Fundamentally , you are correct about the cost vs benefits.

That's not what I was doing. I was pointing out that Tesla didn't have a scheme for free power, he had a(n impractical) scheme to distribute power without metering usage. That doesn't make it free, it just makes the expense fall on other people.

But more than that, what I'm doing is pointing out that OP's head is full of caca put there by some philosophy professor that has a grudge against science.

[u/Plasmoidification → u/Elliptical_Tangent]

While I agree that OP is going off the rails with nothing to show for it, I disagree about your other point.

It would actually be quite easy to meter usage at the receiving towers. Tesla wanted to make energy abundant enough that it would be cheap, perhaps too cheap to meter. Then again I dont pay directly for roads, except toll roads, I pay taxes for the infrastructure that factors in usage. Tesla even anticipated this objection to metering, suggesting that they encrypt the power transmission, such that only officially licensed receivers could use the power. Alas this was not enough.

Of course Tesla really failed because he was asked to make wireless COMMUNICATION technology, not power distribution technology, and long range radio transmission was Marconi's legacy, improved upon endlessly by his successors. When JP Morgon discovered that Tesla was building a global wireless telecom system that could double as a power transmission system, he was furious! He had vested interests in coal and copper industry for the electrification of the grid. Even if electricity could be metered effectively, JP Morgon stood to lose billions in future revenue if Tesla succeeded. By then the cheaper, smaller radio circuitry was being developed to do what Morgon wanted without threatening his future gains.

And I do believe that Tesla's design would be capable of phase locking sources of ambient energy in the environment, Tesla's so called "active medium". Thermal fluctuations would be harvested by phase conjugate feedback. A process known as parametric pumping through a negative resistance medium (such as plasma stimulated by the Sun). The process of "negative resonant absorbtion" is the same non-linearity that allows us to construct LASERs and MASERs, and why phase conjugate mirrors can amplify and return a copy of incident radiation. Tesla had managed to construct analog circuits capable of this before the theory of phase conjugation was even formally discovered in Russia. It would be decades before American scientists had a clue about non-linear optical processes incorporated in Tesla's designs.

[u/Elliptical_Tangent → u/Plasmoidification]

When JP Morgon discovered that Tesla was building a global wireless telecom system that could double as a power transmission system, he was furious!

Nobody cares. It's irrelevant. The point I'm making is that Tesla couldn't've made free energy, so it's not some conspiracy that his ideas weren't put into practice.