Nittany Lion of the Week - Ed DeChellis

very real. It is just a matter of whether human beings can control it, or if nature goes through cycles and we are living in a time where temperatures are naturally rising. Aren’t we still technically in an ice age?

“solved the global warming issue and also created a perpetual motion device”….not a bad days work.

The law of entropy. The universe is always migrating toward a state of disorder. You get the gold star.

These guys actually get around it by introducing steam and sunlight. Where the steam comes from is another matter for another engineer to figure out I guess.

I name my fantasy sports teams the “Perpetual Motion Squad”

…not sure how that’s relevant here, but so it goes…

and this technically wouldn’t be a perpetual motion machine, but it would work as one for all intents and purposes.

In a closed system you couldn’t have perpetual motion (second law of thermodynamics) because entropy always increases. What people always forget is that the Earth isn’t a closed system (the same explanation can help argue against critics of evolution, who try to use the second law of thermodynamics as proof that evolution, where things would get more “ordered” can’t occur), and it isn’t a closed system because we have that big glowing, radiating ball of plasma shining energy down upon us.

So anyway, this device could work as a de facto perpetual motion device (though I think it would probably be better named an alternate solar energy device) by having a resevoir of water and CO2, and use their catalyst & sunlight to create methane, combust that methane, whose by products would be, you guessed it, water and CO2. They would then have re-generated their “fuel” which could be input into the catalyst, and with sunlight produce more methane, rinse and repeat. As long as there are no leaks in the system, and as long as the catalyst doesn’t degrade, and as long as there is sunlight, then voila, you’d have an engine that wouldn’t need any fuel other than the sun.

I doubt this reaction to create methane out of CO2 & water works fast enough to power anything significant, but who knows. At the very least, using it to create methane out of CO2 (such as from factories, but heck, even attached to the tailpipes of cars & trucks) would be a nice way to recycle those greenhouse gasses into another “renewable” fuel source. Of course this is as long as we don’t release the methane, which is actually a worse greenhouse gas than CO2 is.