If heat is energy, why isn’t it possible to genereate electricity out of thin (warm) air and by that cooling our atmosphere while generating (nearly) endless energy?
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Imagine heat as being like a river. It has energy and you can do something with it. But you can’t just take a river, get energy, and make the river disappear. You need to have something like a waterfall, water going from a high place, to a low place, and you put your energy-extracting machine in the middle.
In the case of heat, you absolutely can extract energy, but you can’t just take the energy and make the heat disappear. You would need a place of high heat and a place of low heat and move the heat from high to low. In between the two you place your energy extracting machine and that’s how you’d get energy.
So in the case of heat in the atmosphere, to get energy out you’d need a place of “cold atmosphere” and get the heat to flow between them.
Do some googling on a “carnot engine”, that’s the physics behind what I’m talking about.
In short, in order to get energy from heat you need a hot place, and a cold place, and the amount of energy you get is related to the different in temperatures. If everything is a single temperature you’d get 0 energy out. If you had a source of infinite hot and a source of infinite cold you could create the “most efficient engine” physically possible. Every real engine in existence falls somewhere between the two.
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