Sorry to bother you with this again. I have posted about this 2 times in the last 6 months already, because it is a fascinating topic and i want to talk about it. The issue is, whether there is renewable energy in the universe (truly renewable). Solar energy is called “renewable” but ultimately the sun will burn out. What then?
I have last time gotten the answers that “it’s a stupid question because we have more urgent problems, such as corrupt politics etc.”. Frankly, i disagree. This question is of existential importance, because it gives us an outlook into the far future. These perspectives are more valuable than playing 15 minutes of a computer game, which you could do instead of reading this article.
I uploaded a neat PDF here: https://files.catbox.moe/p8tg6i.pdf
Additionally i will copy-paste the article text here.
Spider Web Cosmology
From: https://feddit.org/u/gandalf_der_12te
Date: 2026-07-26
Subject: Renewable energy in a cosmological context
Abstract
In this paper i present a simple and clear approach to extract useful energy out of the cosmic expansion using mithril material wires, i.e. wires with very high Young’s modulus and ultimate tensile strength. This energy is renewable, such that it represents a continuous and probably eternal power source.
Introduction and Motivation
The industrial revolution has allowed for a significant growth of humanity. While global population numbers were around 300 million around 1000 CE, it scaled to almost 8 billion by 2000 CE. That is an almost 30-fold increase. This was made possible largely by two inventions: the combustion-engine driven tractor and the natural-gas-based ammonia synthesis. Both consume massive amounts of energy, which mostly came from fossil fuels, which are not renewable. This naturally raises the question of whether humanity will ever run out of energy, which would induce a reversal of this massive growth, i.e. a significant population shrinkage. Related to this is the problem of climate change, i.e. whether there exists a long-lasting energy source that does not poison our own living conditions that we rely on.
Ever since solar energy started around 2020 to become economically competitive, many people have felt deep relief from the anxiety around climate change and the threat that humanity would eventually run out of fuel. However, the sun is predicted to burn out in approximately 10 billion years, and then humanity will have to find a new source of energy. While other stars do exist, those too will eventually run out of energy, with the slowest- burning stars (red dwarf stars) predicted to last for approximately 1000 billion years. Slower-burning stars do not practically exist as they would not be massive enough to ignite nuclear fusion in the first place.
What other sources of energy are there in cosmology? Especially, do sources exist that do not run out after a while, i.e. that are truly renewable?
Scope and Context
This paper uses the insights from general relativity, especially cosmic expansion, and simple mechanics to present a mechanism for renewable power in cosmology. While quantum aspects, such as vacuum energy, are highly interesting and might slightly change the reality, they’re left out of this analysis and regarded as an extra feature of nature that will have to be stacked on top of this one.
Mechanism
The term „spider web cosmology“ is justified if one visualizes the core concepts of this proposal:
An array of wires made from a very thin (lightweight) material called „Mithril“ are laid out throughout the universe, which have extremely high elasticity (Young’s modulus), which means they exert force when stretched without significantly changing length.
Living organisms reside at the intersection points. As the intersection points are pulled away from each other over time, the wires between them will be stretched. The force that each wire exerts can then be calculated from Hooke’s law: F=σ⋅A=E⋅ε⋅A , with F being force, σ being stress, E being Young’s modulus, ε being axial strain, A being cross-section area.
The mithril wires are chains of small link elements. As the living organisms at the intersection point let the wires contract from time to time, while generating power from that contraction, new link elements are produced and attached to the wire.
The mithril wires have to be produced from new matter that gets produced from a matter-anti-matter pair, that gets produced from the energy harvested from the chain relaxation. In other words, the chain has to release more energy when it relaxes than the rest mass of the mithril chain links.
This is why this mithril material has to be extremely lightweight while still having high Young’s modulus and high ultimate tensile strength. Practically speaking, I’m not entirely sure whether such a material could exist. Using simplifications and a linear model of elasticity, common steel does not have good enough properties for this application.
I will proof this in the following calculation. For this, we have to look at the rest mass of a steel chain link and the energy that can be released when the chain is relaxed by the length of one link element. Let x be the length of one link element.
The work W1 released by the chain is W 1=F⋅x=E⋅ε⋅A⋅x , while the rest mass (rest energy W2) of one chain link is W 2= ρ⋅A⋅x with density ρ, therefore for W1 to be larger than W2 one gets the relation E⋅ε > ρ. Comparing this to the actual values for steel:
- E is around 200 GPa (2·10¹¹ J/m³)
- ρ is around 8 000 kg/m³, equivalent to a rest energy of around 8·10²⁰ J/m³
Therefore, ε would have to be larger than 4·10⁹, i.e. the steel wire would have to stretch to 4 billion times its usual length. However, commercially available steel used in construction typically breaks apart for ε > 3·10⁻³ (Source: Wikipedia). These steel wires would have to have a factor 10¹² higher ultimate tensile strength!!
The judgement is still out on whether a good enough mithril material could hypothetically exist.
Something something angels dancing on a pin…
Humans are less than 400,000 years old. Human society is far less than 20,000 years. The chances of humans surviving another 5000 years, let alone another 4-10,000,000,000 to see the death of the sun is impossibly and immeasurably small.
We will never need to worry about the sun running out of energy. We will need to worry about stopping the suns energy due to the loss of our current atmospheric environment long before we need to worry about replacing the energy from the sun with ultra long and strong wires and interstellar living and construction nodes.
I believe the “mathematic proof” you’re talking about is just a fraction of the potential energy from cosmic expansion based on factors of some material that doesn’t exist. You could really make that number anything you want, from 0 to 1, because it’s all made up anyway
Interesting idea. Wonderful if it ever proved testable.
In this thread: young man does not understand he needs to stretch a thing billions of light years to have noticeable spacetime expansion measurements using a ruler.
Sure, until everyone is doing it and we irreversibly cause the universe to contract and collapse into a singularity.
yeah, one would intuitively think so. very understandable. the interesting thing is, as long as everyone does it, the universe would not contract from it. the detailed explanation is a bit complicated but becomes clear when one observes that every intersection point’s comoving coordinates stay constant over time as long as the wires pull on each side with equal force. It’s one of these paradoxes (things that seem one way but go another way) of physics.
edit: i should mention that that might be a confusing answer to you. “comoving coordinates” are a mathematical trickery to deal with the coordinate system in more abstract terms. it does not denote the “distance” between intersection points (the “distance” does increase over time still).
I think it is great that you have committed so much effort to learning about how our world works and I would encourage you to continue to pursue your interests in cosmology.
However, the peer-review process in science is an important thing, and the simple fact that you have been struggling to get people to engage with your thesis for the past 6 months is the peer-review process at work, though not necessarily in a formal, academic setting.
For real, this paper you’ve written is science fiction. I truly believe that society needs to go beyond the limitations of science itself, into a process of Post-Normal Science, but Post-Normal Science is a very different thing than science fiction. Post-Normal Science is still subject to peer-review such that the assertions and assumptions are still logically consistent with our empirical reality. As an example of the distinction, though there are a lot of different elements out there in our universe, we have to make materials using the properties that those elements have available to us, we can’t make up the properties that we want the material to have first then try and force the elements to do precisely what we want them to.
Please accept with humility, this paper isn’t going to win a Nobel prize. However, don’t let that reality stop you from looking for answers to the questions you clearly are so passionate about. KEEP GOING!
To try and be a little more supportive I would encourage you to learn more about thermodynamics. Here is a question that has fascinated some of the most brilliant scientists in history that we still have no formalized answer to:
If the second law of thermodynamics states that entropy is always tending to a maximum, and that increasing disorder defines the arrow of time, how is it possible that life even exists? Humans are insanely complex, and exist by taking simple atoms and molecules and combining them in an intricate ordered structure. The different layers of external and internal complex structure is incalculable; we are extremely highly ordered in a universe forcing disorder.
As an example I’ll point out Schrödinger’s 1944 book called “What is Life” where he suggested the concept of ‘negentropy’ as a potential answer to this question. This question is relevant to your thesis, as realistically it is useful energy (or a Demon, I suppose) that is needed to do the work in ordering, that is, working against the 2nd law, and you’re thesis is trying to find a truly renewable (i.e. infinite) energy source in the universe with which to achieve the Demon’s task.
Since it is clear that you have a solid foundational background in physics, I would recommend reading Isabelle Stenger’s work on thermodynamics and dissipative structures. Very specifically, try chapter 10 of her book “Power and Invention: Situating Science”.
One prevailing argument here is that dissipated energy (i.e. heat) can never be converted into useful work (a different interpretation of the 2nd law). Some even argue that the expansion of the universe (the gradient that your web is attempting to extract useful energy from) is caused by the constant increase in dissipated energy that the 2nd law forces on our universe. Now this is only one interpretation of the existing thermodynamic framework in our scientific community, but this view is explicitly saying that useful work can never be extracted from the expansion of the universe, unfortunately contradicting your main thesis.
Thank you very much for your hard work and contributions to society here in bringing these ideas forward in this space to inspire public discourse and debate.
so your whole comment is very belittling and i would not give that advice to a five-year old child because while you do say “thank you for your contribution”, you did not actually interact with the content. i assume you glanced over it and said “well that won’t work because … idk. if it worked, i’d have already heard about it”. that does not stimulate discussion but hinder it.
As an example of the distinction, though there are a lot of different elements out there in our universe, we have to make materials using the properties that those elements have available to us, we can’t make up the properties that we want the material to have first then try and force the elements to do precisely what we want them to.
so first of all, actually this is precisely what has happened in science multiple times over. the chemical element germanium was theoretically predicted first (by mendelejev) and only after that was it experimentally discovered. the planet neptune was first posited to exist based on mathematical calculations, only after that has it been found in the night sky. so yes, we do routinely make predictions about absurd and exotic stuff and only after that actually start looking for it.
If the second law of thermodynamics states that entropy is always tending to a maximum, and that increasing disorder defines the arrow of time, how is it possible that life even exists? Humans are insanely complex, and exist by taking simple atoms and molecules and combining them in an intricate ordered structure. The different layers of external and internal complex structure is incalculable; we are extremely highly ordered in a universe forcing disorder.
Also this has nothing to do with thermodynamics. Thermodynamics historically developed to describe hot gases and combustion engines, things on everyday-life scales. It’s never made to describe processes on cosmological scale. I hope that you do not seriously apply that theory outside of its intended context, because those results would be meaningless. There is no indication that cosmological processes would have to adhere to the second law of thermodynamics (or if you do have such indication, please send it to me, i’d like to see it). Please make as little unnecessary assumptions as possible.
I didn’t mean to belittle anyone.
I was simply trying to suggest some interesting further reading on the topic you are studying and engaged with. This is an area of interest of mine as well.
ok, thanks :) is there something that you would like to know more about specifically? i might be able to give you some hints as well
Okay, some issues:
A) The tension along these wires will be transmitted at the speed of sound in that material. The good news is that the speed of sound in this “mithril” material under tension would be extremely fast. The bad news is that it will still be far less than the speed of light, and so it would be pretty slow on a cosmic scale.
B) I’m not sure that Hooke’s law would apply here. The cables aren’t really stretching like a spring. The universe is stretching, with the cable in it. There are still a lot of unknowns around how cosmic expansion actually works, but I think one real option here is that the cables don’t actually ‘stretch’ – the tension force pulling on them never increases – they just become longer as the space they’re in becomes longer. A 1m section of cable will still be 1m long over time, it’s just that the meter got bigger.
C) Somewhere in this spiderweb network, there has to be an edge. (You can’t fill an entire infinite universe – you don’t have infinite time and materials to work with.) There must be some nodes that are connected on one side but not the other. So they will have a net force applied in one direction. Over time, this force will accelerate the edge node toward the rest of the network. Over a long enough timescale (assuming cosmic expansion isn’t enough to counteract it entirely) the network will pull itself into a smaller and smaller area.
D) “The Big Rip” hypothesis could be a problem. On a long enough timescale, it hypothesizes that endless cosmic expansion will eventually begin affecting things even on smaller scales, ripping planets, people, molecules, and eventually even atoms apart – because the space between their component parts becomes too great for them to stay together over. If that’s true, it puts a limit to how long this approach can generate energy. If that’s false, it’s potentially worse for your plan – one way to explain why it wouldn’t happen is that cosmic expansion only occurs in truly empty space, away from any mass … which means your cables (having mass) wouldn’t experience any expansion at all? Not sure how that squares with the rest of space expanding. Maybe it prevents space from expanding between connected nodes? Could end up having some very weird effects maybe.
The judgement is still out on whether a good enough mithril material could hypothetically exist.
Yeah … I’m going to go ahead and put a big fat “nope” on that. The bonds between individual atoms in that material would have to be insanely strong. And while there are still big holes in our knowledge of cosmology, I think we do know enough chemistry already to determine that molecular bonds that strong just aren’t possible.
You could maybe theorize some crazy stuff with degenerate matter or new ‘island of stability’ elements, but both of those would be extremely dense, so even if they were somehow incredibly strong, they’d be disqualified for being too heavy.
Though, if you were going to go full sci-fi and try to hand-wave a material that could do this, I’d say forget atoms entirely. Say that your cables are made of long chains of protons and neutrons, all connected in a line by the strong nuclear force, effectively becoming a single, extremely long and thin atom. Honestly, I don’t think even that would be strong enough. And also it would have to be kept in constant extreme tension to avoid collapsing in on itself and forming into normal atoms instead – it would be a tricky balancing act between the strand trying to collapse in on itself and the external force pulling it apart. Too much force, it breaks. Too little force, it collapses into individual atoms (with a spicy release of energy along the way).
yeah, the long chain of protons and neutrons is an interesting idea. I’ll think about it :)
Cosmic expansion can’t even overcome local gravity, which is way weaker than the force required to stretch any material.
cosmic expansion (if you represent it as a pseudo-force) increases linearly with distance, meanwhile gravity gets weaker quadratically with distance. that means, at a certain point, cosmic expansion is going to be stronger than gravity. here’s a visualization for you:
(forgive that i didn’t pretty up the diagram much. i just don’t care enough to label everything properly. you get the idea)
but you’re talking about a material, which are governed by electromagnetic forces. These are simply way too strong. You simply can’t build a structure that is so flimsy that it could be affected by cosmic expansion but not also be torn down by the smallest local distortions.
Also there is a huge gaping question of how to build and maintain such a structure, because it would needs to light-year long. Even if this magical material existed we wouldn’t be able to do anything without signifiant advances in space travel … and we’re talking things like “warp drive” here. So just more Science Fiction.
Well you’re treating this as a logistical engineering question. We’re not at that point, this is a manner of energy generation that only becomes necessary after a trillion years, after all the stars have burned out, after all the available hydrogen in the galaxy has been burned up in fusion reactions. How to build and maintain this system is definitely a problem for someone else, many years from now.
Also, you say this wouldn’t be possible without spacecraft advances like warp drive… But over this incredible time frame, you really don’t need any magical advance in spacecraft. Over the course of a trillion years, at the rate it’s going now, the Voyager spacecraft will have traveled over 50 million light years (that distance is about 500 times the diameter of the Milky Way). So, we can travel the distances needed to do this over the truly, epically, astonishingly immense timeframe available.
But more to the point, this is a theoretical question, a question about the nature of the universe. This isn’t really a logistical question. We’re not asking “how” one could do it, we’re asking “if” one could do it. Or, what aspect of physics, if any, precludes this from ever being viable?
Well you’re treating this as a logistical engineering question.
I wasn’t mostly, it’s just one more implausible aspect I added to this “story”. It already fails at the fundamental physics level.
Care to elaborate? (As again, that’s the actual point of the thread)
See my previous comments.
The core proposition here is that some material could be stretched by cosmic expansion. But cosmic expansion is so weak it can already be countered by gravity. But gravity is orders of magnitudes weaker than the electromagnetic force governing materials.
Take interstellar gas clouds for example. They are barely denser than the vacuum of empty space, yet still bound by gravity and thus immune to cosmic expansion. OP would need a material that is somehow weaker bound than a gas cloud, which could hardly be called a material any more. That’s just random atoms in space.
This seems like one of those physics hacks that don’t work, because the laws of the universe close them off in unintuitive ways
Like at some point, the tensile stretch is essentially sound. Mythril wires aside, the weights are still subject to gravity. And not just gravity, but the kind of n-body gravity of a cosmic scale superstructure
Those strings are going to ring with the song of the universe, I don’t think they could even be kept in tension even if they magically had both infinite tensile and shearing strength
The cherry on top is that we don’t really understand cosmic expansion or the forces behind it… We have models that work to a point, but only to a point. We know our models are wrong (or say least incomplete), so there’s no guarantee it’ll continue when the stars go dark
The cherry on top is that we don’t really understand cosmic expansion or the forces behind it… We have models that work to a point, but only to a point. We know our models are wrong (or say least incomplete), so there’s no guarantee it’ll continue when the stars go dark
yeah, that’s a fair argument and i considered it as well. you’re right, we don’t fully understand how cosmic expansion is gonna develop in billions of years, however, there’s roughly 3 scenarios:
- cosmic expansion comes to a halt after a while
- cosmic expansion continues at an even rate, i.e. the Hubble parameter remains a constant non-zero value
- the hubble parameter oscillates up and down over time
all three cases are interesting. in the 1. case (which is surprisingly difficult to describe) some parts of the universe continue to contract while others continue to expand. ultimately we might be able to survive indefinitely in this universe by constantly exploring new areas (there’s no “off limits” area if the universe doesn’t expand continuously).
the 2. case is discussed in this article.
in the 3. case, you could extract energy out of a “change of the laws of physics over time”, i.e. if gravity has different strength each day, you could move a boulder up on a mountain when it’s weak and down when it’s strong and generate power that way. similar thing is possible if hubble parameter is non-constant over time. i won’t go into detail because do you really care about the details of that maths?
That’s just the cherry on top - my main argument is that it’s impossible to build in the first place
I don’t think the thing could be put in tension in the first place. Gravity will act on every link in the chain unpredictably, and the “nodes” won’t hold their place in space either
I think it would all be tugged out of place immediately, and the ungodly amounts of energy to set it up (even assuming infinitely strong mythril) would outweigh the energy that could be collected during the collapse of the system
Also, realistically entropy is absolute. Realistically the chains would break and require more energy than could be harnessed to sustain order
Isn’t nuclear power easier than this mithril stuff?
Sure, for as long as fuel lasts.
This won’t work for many many reasons. But if we’ll allow a bit of fantasy, it still won’t work.
Gravity dominates at smaller scales. If the expansion of the universe were to work like you describe, we wouldn’t exist and there wouldn’t be very many interesting things in the universe. The expansion is a very very small factor, almost non-existent. This means at smaller scales, like say the size of a galaxy, gravity dominates. Meaning the movement and relative position is determined by the gravity of those objects and expansion plays no part. It’s only on very large scales the expansion becomes a thing.
You can think about the expansion as more space being created within the existing space. But when you’re in a gravity dominated area, the gravity pulls the matter together, so the extra space has no impact at all. But when looking at galaxies very far away, there isn’t any gravity keeping them in relation to us. So when looking over vast distances (and vast amounts of time), we can see the red-shift because they are moving away from us. But those galaxies are still perfectly intact, it’s not like all that time ripped them apart, just the distance in between us and them.
There is this idea about a big rip. In this scenario the mechanism creating more space gets more pronounced in the future. This means after a very long time, it might start to dominate over gravity. At first on large scales, later even on smaller scales, up to the point everything is ripped apart and only the smallest of things can exist. That would mean no more galaxies, no more solar systems and maybe not even molecules or atoms. But there isn’t a whole lot of indication this would actually happen and the time scales involved are huge.
Also important, like theneverfox said, the universe has ways of closing off these kinds of loop holes. Imagine creating a whip from this material you describe. When you would make that whip long enough (and compared to the scale you describe it can be tiny), you’d easily be able to get the end beyond the speed of light when whipping it. Obviously this can’t work, so we know this material simply cannot exist. Nothing with a tensile strength like you describe can exist, not even in theory and applying some fantasy magic. It would break the laws of physics. (And not even getting into the amount of energy per volume such a material would have is beyond black hole levels, so that’s a whole thing)
Also important, like theneverfox said, the universe has ways of closing off these kinds of loop holes. Imagine creating a whip from this material you describe. When you would make that whip long enough (and compared to the scale you describe it can be tiny), you’d easily be able to get the end beyond the speed of light when whipping it. Obviously this can’t work, so we know this material simply cannot exist. Nothing with a tensile strength like you describe can exist, not even in theory and applying some fantasy magic. It would break the laws of physics. (And not even getting into the amount of energy per volume such a material would have is beyond black hole levels, so that’s a whole thing)
interesting argument with the whip, i’ll think about it.
however your second point about the amount of energy per volume that such a material would have, i calculated that and it’s about equal to the rest mass of the material. in other words, charging it with energy the way i intended would roughly double its total mass. not create a black hole.
(that’s because you’re siphoning off that energy to create more mithril wire. so the stored energy in the old wire has to be at minimum equal to the rest mass of the new mithril wire. i hope that makes sense.)
No I mean if you create a material with such a tensile strength, the amount of energy would be well into black hole territory. Like just the energy contained within the material itself, not the energy added to it.
And please note these are just examples, there are so many ways how this cannot possibly work. You would do well to get a foundation in physics first, before trying to tackle these kinds of things. Or just go into writing fantasy books instead, that way it doesn’t matter if it’s possible or not.
My personal preference for fantasy is that the writer does create a rigid framework for rules that work in the imaginary universe and keeps to it as much as possible. That way it prevents major plot holes and inconsistencies within the universe.
Your response is good, and I have only one comment:
Nothing with a tensile strength like you describe can exist, not even in theory and applying some fantasy magic.
By þe common definition of Fantasy, þe laws of physics apply only loosely. Even when it tries to apply physics laws it often does so by inventing fantastic sources: magic works by pulling energy from a demon realm, or hyperdrive by leveraging oþer dimensions. Much fantasy never tries to balance books; fireballs appearing out of þin air, starships travelling at multiples of þe speed of light in a vacuum.
Fantasy doesn’t generally try to abide by any of IRL laws of physics, hard sci-fi being a notable and relatively small sub-genre. You can break all sorts of laws of physics in fantasy, and much of þe body does.
Cosmic expansion doesn’t work like that. The wires would expand along with everything else in the universe.
frankly, that’s bullshit. locally, the wires would be under stress if they’re stretched.
They are not being stretched. You need to seriously re think what cosmic expansion is. It isn’t the physical movement of things in the universe, it’s the density of them that is changing. The wires become less dense, along with everything else, so there is no net change between them and the rest of the universe.
No, the wires do not become less dense.
There is a virtual force acting to separate each part of the chain from each other part, but locally that force is orders of magnitude less than the bonding forces holding it together. The structure and density of the chain is therefore dominated by electromagnetic forces, rather than the expansion of space.
At large enough scale the expansion force will grow to become comparable to, or exceed, exceed the binding forces. That will cause the chain to stretch, but the electromagnetic forces will still exist and still be applying a restorative force trying to contract the chain again.
I’m pretty sure this requires many light-years of chain though, unless the acceleration of the universe is accelerating (in which case this same principle will eventually tear apart all matter, of any size), and I very much doubt that physics allows a material with the necessary properties
The Wikipedia page has the details:
Expansion of space
It is often erroneously argued that cosmic expansion must be interpreted as the expansion of space itself, such that galaxies are stationary as the space between them stretches. This description suggests the existence of a preferred rest frame, in violation of the principle of relativity. On the contrary, the expansion of the universe is naturally interpreted as galaxies moving apart.
Woah, why have I been thinking it’s the expansion of space itself? Now that I think about it, I wouldn’t expect that (alone) to cause a redshift. Weird. Maybe I used to know better
no, look. there’s a thing called proper distance that does increase over time. you’re mixing up things here.
the planets of the solar system do not move further away from the sun over time. they are gravitationally bound. that is because while there is a pseudo-force pulling them apart, due to how weird orbital mechanics are, that does not actually lift them to a higher orbit. for the planets to change to a higher orbit, they would have to accelerate forward instead. it’s weird, i know.
anyways, the wires do get stretched over time.
Literally in the first paragraph of the link you supplied:
“Comoving distance factors out the expansion of the universe, giving a distance that does not change in time except due to local factors, such as the motion of a galaxy within a cluster.”
It factors out the thing you are trying to use to create energy.
comoving distances are a way to describe coordinates. they do not represent what you would measure with a ruler. instead, a ruler would measure the proper distance (which is explained further down in the article). and that does increase with time due to expansion.
You can’t just use one way of measuring distance for one thing and another way for something else and then jam then together to get perpetual energy.
uhm actually, changing coordinate systems we do all the time. Just that we use a number to describe some location, does not mean that that number immediately translates to some measurable quantity. Often we choose abstract coordinate systems to simplify calculations (such as polar coordinates or comoving coordinates). Then, if we want to actually measure things, we have to translate these coordinates into physically measurable variables, which is a translation to another coordinate system. That is what’s happening here. the “proper distance” is the physically measurable quantity (as would be measured by a ruler). the “comoving distance” is an abstract coordinate system, that is not directly a measurable quantity. That’s what’s happening here.
Generally speaking, thought experiments need to yield useful conclusions before they’re worth publishing. Even if your “mithril” could exist, this thought experiment doesn’t even cover the question of whether this system of chains would yield enough energy to justify the amount of energy that would be spent creating and maintaining this cosmic-scale mechanism. And wouldn’t the “biological organisms” be constantly spending colossal amounts of energy just to prevent these chains from ripping away from their anchor points?
And not all types of energy are equal. Energy needs to useful. Even if this system could be created at an energy profit, how would we harness that energy towards useful ends? Would the energy be used to somehow boil water to turn a dynamo to generate electricity? Does enough water even exist on Earth to be put to that purpose? We can currently cause fusion reactions if we want to, but the problem is harnessing them towards useful purposes. We don’t need to invent an even bigger bomb.
Does enough water even exist on Earth to be put to that purpose?
If you’re stretching “mithril” spiderwebs across the universe, I’m pretty sure you don’t need to worry about being constrained to Earth’s water supply anymore. There’s lots of water (mostly frozen) in other places in the universe, with several examples in our own solar system and surely plenty of others around other stars. And you could always make water if you can find some oxygen and combine it together with the most abundant element in the universe. And even if water shortages are still an issue … theoretically, you could replace water with any other liquid that has a relatively convenient boiling point. Steam (or steam-adjacent) turbines don’t have to run on water, in theory.
Even if your “mithril” could exist, this thought experiment doesn’t even cover the question of whether this system of chains would yield enough energy to justify the amount of energy that would be spent creating and maintaining this cosmic-scale mechanism.
actually that’s the whole point of the second half of the article. did you even read it?
There’s a difference between calculating the necessary tensile strength of a chain and calculating how much energy would be required to make a chain of that tensile strength. For example, if an undiscovered element is required, does that mean it would need to be generated from nothing, so to speak, with a particle accelerator? How much energy would that take for a cosmically large chain? Or are we to assume that a massive asteroid composed entirely of this miracle material will simply pass Earth closely by?
For example, if an undiscovered element is required, does that mean it would need to be generated from nothing, so to speak, with a particle accelerator?
Yes. That is specifically what i assumed. W2 is the rest mass of the mithril chain link, i.e. the (minimum) energy required by a particle accelerator to produce that material out of nothing.
I think Dyson spheres or shooting energy into black holes would be easier than this even if it was possible
Let me be honest: 10 billion years until the sun burns out is a lot. The world seems to change fast these last centuries and it’s basically impossible to predict how it’s gonna look in 2050. Therefore I believe crafting a solution that on its face seems to be rather impractical, solving something that will only become a problem in the very distant future, using very long theoretical causational links to predict the trend, and assuming the net gain could be worth it is not helpful. It’s so far removed from normal science, it reminds me of conspiracy theories like the idea that you can somehow use the Giza pyramids as a power source.
You need to think about frame of reference first: you cannot speculate on what we might have and be able to do in the future. You are assuming a bunch of things, and science doesn’t assume, in science you start with the assumption that all of your claims bullshit, and then disprove it. For your theories this will take centuries anyway because there is so many assumptions and some of them will take many papers in order to understand if and how they work.
Some examples:
- Start with the expanding force of the universe: is there one? How big? On which scale does it overcome modern power sources? Confirm multiple different ways that this scale is realistic.
- do the physics work on that scale? Is the expanding force big enough to pull it apart and keep it from folding out? How would gravity from surrounding cosmic bodies affect it? How well does it withstand big and small impacts from different bodies?
- how do you actually translate expansion to energy? What’s the loss to thermal energy? What are typical conversion rates for this? How exactly do you do the conversion? Why would you be able to do some functioning conversion?
- how does it transport the energy back to the point of origin? What kind of cables work with minimal loss over these distances?
- what’s the impact on our electric grid, the impact on gravitational forces, etc.? Would this destabilize our solar system?
You are hovering over your assumptions and this is exactly where quack theories live. That’s why people are extremely suspicious. Everyone can make up a theory on how generating electricity might be possible in the future using technologies we haven’t even invented yet. Sure, we might, but before anyone wants to actually think of that you need to put in the leg work to prove this technology is not only practical but at least one some scale it exists. And you have to do this for all of the things you are assuming.
- the harness
- binding materials
- protective materials
- conductive materials
- resources needed in production
- resources needed in deployment
Let me also stress that no one is annoyed that you think of solutions for problems. People are annoyed because you are the 100th guy dreaming up an incredibly outlandish solution to a problem that doesn’t really affect us in any way currently, and then you are winging the parts that scientists spend most of their time on. Lots of math, lots of different ways to confirm the math, field studies, disproving, collaboration, etc., there’s so much more to it.
Trust, if there’s interesting aspects to it, and you find people outside of your circles that find your theories somewhat plausible, you should try to get a peer-review. And then you probably have to do a bunch of follow up research, but that’s how scientific consensus moves: slowly and in tiny chunks.
Let me be honest: 10 billion years until the sun burns out is a lot.
And even then, we don’t need to resort to this kind of stuff to get energy…
First, just move to a different star. Stars will keep forming and keep burning for long, long after our own sun is gone. And some smaller stars can keep going for a ridiculously long time, still outputting plenty of energy for you as long as you’re close to it.
Even after the last stars have burned out, you could probably keep a modest, power-efficient civilization going for quite a while on residual heat energy, fission and fusion nuclear reactors, harvesting energy from black hole accretion disks, etc.
Even after that runs out, you may be able to harvest Hawking radiation by orbiting close to a black hole as it slowly evaporates.
And by the time the black holes have all evaporated and even that runs out … well, that’s so far in the future that maybe we should just all agree that we had a good run while it lasted and give up? That’s such an unimaginably distant time in the future that the current entire age of the universe would seem like nothing in comparison. Our ~13 billion years we’ve had so far would be only a tiny invisible sliver at the very beginning of a timeline that long.
uhh, i get your point, but my point wasn’t to “build a machine that works”. rather, i’m having a mathematical background (personally) and doing an “existence proof” here: i show that something is possible, not that something is efficient or can be easily built. many such proofs exist throughout the field of mathematics, and also physics, to show the consistency or inconsistency of some other, more practical theory. this is often useful because even when you cannot find an object itself, knowing that it must exist can have distinct benefits.
i’m gonna exemplify this with the proof that the square root of 2 is irrational. the proof assumes that two natural numbers a and b exist such that sqrt(2) = a / b. Then it derives a contradiction from that and that’s how we know that sqrt(2) is irrational. At no point were the numbers a and b ever found. Hence, by your metrics, such a proof is “useless” (because it does not construct a or b). but, the value is not to find a number, but to proof that it does / does not exist. different category of goal here.
Well, there’s a big difference between consistency and probability.
In that case you might wanna be careful to point out the very experimental ground this stands on.
Solar energy is called “renewable” but ultimately the sun will burn out. What then?
I can’t speak to physics, but have you read The Last Question?
