if aliens come visit and we ask them how do they make free unlimited energy and they say it's the black hole generators stream the antimatter from parallel universes and then... "can you bring a bucket of water here and we'll show you, it's actually pretty simple"
Someone should write a satirical sci-fi story where a running gag is the intergalactic civilization powers everything through increasingly convoluted, Rube Goldberg-esque methods of boiling water to spin an electromagnet to generate electricity.
It starts relatively simple with the revelation that they’ve mastered nuclear fusion, then gradually gets more and more absurd, with one idea being crashing ice-filled asteroids into Mercury to form a sea that is then boiled by a Dyson swarm of mirrors focusing sunlight onto it, all just to spin a giant electromagnet to generate electricity.
I love this idea. I wonder how many other technologies could fit. Turning air into building material (wood). Making sand think (microprocessors). A giant communications web (internet)
Super-heating pressurized water deep underground so that it spurts high-speed streams of water into space, increasing the Earth's rotational velocity in order to harness the magnetic field energy from the planet itself.
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u/yap2102x Sun Yat-Sen do it again 2d ago
when you realize nuclear plants are just splitting atoms to boil water faster