Extracting gravitional energy from galactic spin?

[Atheist-Lite]

I've noticed it saves a lot of energy to use planetary spin to send probes places. Is it possible to reverse this technique to extract energy from the interactions of the earths spin with the spin of the galaxy as the planet plots a fairly describable course round the outer edge of the galaxy? I'd imagine any technology would involve precise gyroscopes and shit like that? I was never very good at dynamics but I was pretty good at number games, and something tells me there is some vast amount of energy in either slowing the earths rotation down a bit, or changing this entire solar systems course through the galaxy?

[Schneibster]

You'd be surprised how little. And at galactic distance scales, it's many orders of magnitude less.

[Jason]

Didn't Tesla have a theory on this? Pure rubbish iirc.

[Schneibster]

I'd be surprised. Tesla was into electromagnetism, not gravity.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

The gravitational mass of the doctor that delivered you is stronger than that of any planet in the solar system. Extrapolate that out to the galaxy and you can see the miniscule amount of energy there is available from that source.

[Jason]

Yes he is well known for his discoveries in electromagnetism, but he was also a quack and into various strange theories.

Field theories
When he was 81, Tesla stated he had completed a "dynamic theory of gravity". He stated that it was "worked out in all details" and that he hoped to soon give it to the world.[77] The theory was never published.
The bulk of the theory was developed between 1892 and 1894, during the period that he was conducting experiments with high frequency and high potential electromagnetism and patenting devices for their use. Reminiscent of Mach's principle, Tesla stated in 1925 that:


Nikola Tesla, with Ruđer Bošković's book Theoria Philosophiae Naturalis, sits in front of the spiral coil of his high-frequency transformer at East Houston Street, New York.
There is no thing endowed with life—from man, who is enslaving the elements, to the nimblest creature—in all this world that does not sway in its turn. Whenever action is born from force, though it be infinitesimal, the cosmic balance is upset and the universal motion results.
Tesla was critical of Einstein's relativity work, calling it:
...[a] magnificent mathematical garb which fascinates, dazzles and makes people blind to the underlying errors. The theory is like a beggar clothed in purple whom ignorant people take for a king ... its exponents are brilliant men but they are metaphysicists rather than scientists ...[78]
Tesla also argued:
I hold that space cannot be curved, for the simple reason that it can have no properties. It might as well be said that God has properties. He has not, but only attributes and these are of our own making. Of properties we can only speak when dealing with matter filling the space. To say that in the presence of large bodies space becomes curved is equivalent to stating that something can act upon nothing. I, for one, refuse to subscribe to such a view.[79]
Tesla also believed that much of Albert Einstein's relativity theory had already been proposed by Ruđer Bošković, stating in an unpublished interview:
...the relativity theory, by the way, is much older than its present proponents. It was advanced over 200 years ago by my illustrious countryman Ruđer Bošković, the great philosopher, who, notwithstanding other and multifold obligations, wrote a thousand volumes of excellent literature on a vast variety of subjects. Bošković dealt with relativity, including the so-called time-space continuum ...'.[80]

Google search his Dynamic theory of gravity if you like. Basically he thought he could harness this theoretical energy.

[Schneibster]

I always kinda tried to avoid his crazy. Got too much respect for him as an EE to want to see him brought low.

He was right about Edison, but wrong about Einstein.

[Rum]

And yet we extract energy from gravity by allowing water to fall and drive turbines..

[Schneibster]

Actually, the energy was stored in gravitic potential in the first place, by heat from the Sun that evaporated the water and then caused it to rain out on the tops of mountains.

[Rum]

Actually, the energy was stored in gravitic potential in the first place, by heat from the Sun that evaporated the water and then caused it to rain out on the tops of mountains.

...right back to the big bang which contained it all in one tiny place!

[Schneibster]

Sure, but I tend to be OK with "it came from the Sun" if I'm not thinking in cosmological terms.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

And yet we extract energy from gravity by allowing water to fall and drive turbines..

Yep, proximity is the key there. The planetary mass under our feet is strangely attractive, isn't it?

[Warren Dew]

I was never very good at dynamics but I was pretty good at number games, and something tells me there is some vast amount of energy in either slowing the earths rotation down a bit, or changing this entire solar systems course through the galaxy?

Yes - tidal power plants do exactly this.

[Atheist-Lite]

I was never very good at dynamics but I was pretty good at number games, and something tells me there is some vast amount of energy in either slowing the earths rotation down a bit, or changing this entire solar systems course through the galaxy?

Yes - tidal power plants do exactly this.

They don't appear to be very effecient or productive compared to the energy which must be out there?

[Warren Dew]

They don't appear to be very effecient or productive compared to the energy which must be out there?

They're not. I don't think they're cost efficient yet.