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On Path Independence

vitalik.eth.limo · 2,750 words · saved by 1 readers

Suppose that someone walks up to you and starts exclaiming to you that he thinks he has figured out how to create a source of unlimited free energy. His scheme looks as follows. First, you get a spaceship up to low Earth orbit. There, Earth's gravity is fairly high, and so the spaceship will start to accelerate heavily toward the earth. The spaceship puts itself into a trajectory so that it barely brushes past the Earth's atmosphere, and then keeps hurtling far into space. Further in space, the gravity is lower, and so the spaceship can go higher before it starts once again coming down. When it comes down, it takes a curved path toward the Earth, so as to maximize its time in low orbit, maximizing the acceleration it gets from the high gravity there, so that after it passes by the Earth it goes even higher. After it goes high enough, it flies through the Earth's atmosphere, slowing itself down but using the waste heat to power a thermal reactor. Then, it would go back to step one and k

Dark Mode Toggle On Path Independence 2017 Jun 22 See all posts On Path Independence Suppose that someone walks up to you and starts exclaiming to you that he thinks he has figured out how to create a source of unlimited free energy. His scheme looks as follows. First, you get a spaceship up to low Earth orbit. There, Earth's gravity is fairly high, and so the spaceship will start to accelerate heavily toward the earth. The spaceship puts itself into a trajectory so that it barely brushes past the Earth's atmosphere, and then keeps hurtling far into space. Further in space, the gravity is lowe

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