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Comment by Florin_Andrei | Hacker News Reader

So they're cooling the Earth to make energy.

You could imagine a dystopian sci-fi novel where "at the end of times" the only source of energy available is this - slowly leech heat out of your planet to make some energy. Decisions, decisions...

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I've always wondered if some far future civilisation grappling with the heat death of the universe will judge me harshly for mixing hot and cold water together just to make warm water.

I don't think you need to increase the heat flow to capture the free energy? If I find a hot bath that is just haphazardly dumping heat into a cold bath, increasing entropy unnecessarily, it's perfectly possible for me to stick a heat engine in between them and capture the free energy from that flow (averting entropy creation) without actually changing the heat flow (joules per second) between the baths.

Isaac Asimov's "The Gods Themselves" has a similar plot point, except one universe is dumping its excess entropy into another.

Like... a war with robots where man covers the sky in clouds to cut off their power supply so the robots take the humans for a power supply and simulate 1990s to keep them distracted, while remaining free humans dig into the earth?

>slowly leech heat out of your planet

It's a gloomy scenario, but we wouldn't run out of the energy too quickly:

>Nearly half of the Earth's heat comes from the radioactive decay of materials inside [1]

[1] https://phys.org/news/2011-08-radioactive-key-ingredient-ear...

I so hoped the article was about how somehow, someone stumbled upon a null field generator and that it worked.

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