Zero-Point Energy Makes Power Pervasive & Free

Why this space age science could disrupt society as we know it

Sean Everett

Published in

Mission.org

7 min readJun 21, 2017

I. Setting the Stage

What would happen if energy, electricity, and power were pervasive and free? When a bum all the way up to an entire country would no longer have to worry about wars over oil, flights running out of fuel, or having to build a giant rocket to carry a giant tub of rocket fuel in order to get it to escape velocity and keep it going to Mars.

When you combine those two concepts: available anywhere at zero cost, you’ve got something more valuable than when man discovered fire.

Note that humankind didn’t invent fire. We discovered it. Because it already existed.

Zero-point energy may already exist. If so, we would only need to invent the technology to harness it. But it would also mean that this technology may never see the light of day because it would entirely disrupt the power and wealth heirarchy of our world and societal culture.

II. Defining Zero-Point Energy

You might have heard of Richard Feynman. He was a Physicist that was well-known for his brilliance but also his ability to reduce complex topics down to freshman level understanding.

One of the things he described was Zero-Point Energy. He posited that it held an order of magnitude greater power than nuclear energy, with:

One teacup of empty space contains enough energy to boil all the world’s oceans.

In order to appropriately define zero-point energy, we need to go down to quantum states. The smallest of the very small. When we zoom in that far, everything becomes a vibration and a probability. Pay special attention to Tau.

It’s either here, or there. And no matter how cold absolute zero is in outer space, there still exists these vibrations. And heat is nothing more than energized particles moving around really fast. Microwaves do that. It just sends a wave into your food to excite the particles, they bump into each other, friction, heat and blammo, you’ve got a breakfast burrito.

But what happens in the cold reaches of outer space? There is no heat. There is no vibration, right?

Wrong. There is still movement. There’s still motion. It’s called the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. You may have heard of this in the new Einstein TV series called Genius currently playing on National Geographic.

As we said above, it means you don’t know where something is until you observe it. Until then it’s only a probability.

But what you’ll come to find out from the scientific community is that there’s a disagreement about all of this. Some believe in theory, others in practice, simply by measuring how much energy exists in an empty vacuum space.

Following this rabbit hole for the curious will take you to interesting places not just in physics, but into philosophy, and yes, even national security and the defense department.

Why does the universe expand instead of contract or remain constant? And why is that expasion accelerating? Motion requires energy, right? So therefore, there is some kind of “dark energy” pushing the universe apart in every spot, much like the classic visualization of raisin bread rising.

I call it God’s Drop of Chaos, but replace that G word with whatever definition you like. The truth remains that even the tiniest, most subtle vibration, when compounded across an infinite universe would add up to exploding stars, life, and an ever-increasing cosmos.

III. Are Aliens Real?

Are we the only life in the universe? It hasn’t been proven in public but there sure has been quite a variation in species over the millenia on this single rock next to a single sun.

But who cares anyways. The Great Filter doesn’t get passed by warring species who don’t develop elegant technologies. Isn’t this what Humanizing Tech is all about? More elegance, less combat?

Imagine for a moment that aliens do exist. And that they’ve existed far longer than us neanderthalic Homo sapiens. They look at us like cavemen. Still taking physical time to travel between point A and B instead of taking a shortcut by bending space in half. We burn physical objects to release their natural battery energy instead of just going straight to the source itself.

That’s what we’re talking about here.

Zoom all the way into matter. Put a small lever atop a vibrating whatchamajigger. Capture that energy in real-time from the quark level all the way up to a teacup of space. No need for energy storage (it can only be borrowed anyways). Add it together and use it for whatever you like.

Get access to the Energy API, if you will.

Plug it into an engine, a TV, heck even your cell phone. Because let’s be honest. We’re all sick of cables. And we don’t want a bunch of man-made waves permeating our bodies like radiation and making us sick. Why not use what’s already there?

The real problem, of course, is finding a way to build that pico-scopic lever.

IV. Political Complications

And then you have to imagine what’s going to happen to the free world when you completely upend their economy. Saudi Arabia suddenly becomes the poorest country in the world. The Iraq war no longer matters.

Nuclear energy, utilities, solar, wind, and millions of peoples jobs are suddenly gone.

Energy is free. And energy is everywhere.

The universe would agree with that statement. The universe doesn’t charge us to drink water or eat plants or lay in the sun. The universe makes that free. It’s mankind who charges for it, wars over it, and holds it back from people who need it most.

Imagine threatening those in political and financial power with something as useful, pervasive, and non-profitable. Energy ripples all the way up. Everyone’s out of a job. It’s the biggest Depression in the history of mankind. It’s like ripping the entire bottom row of Jenga blocks out from under the other blocks.

Everything collapses. Because of the Cosmological Constant.

So there is incentive from the human race to prevent this new technology from emerging, even if it’s already been developed deep in R&D labs. You already don’t know about new technology that’s available today that will charge your cell phone or electric car from zero to full in 5 minutes. There are thousands of examples of this.

What makes zero point energy any different?

The real problem is we only fund what is on the public consiousness. Everyone uses Snapchat? Go fund that. Everyone uses Groupon? Go fund that. Everyone uses Uber? Go fund that.

So our technology industry follows the same power law as VC returns because human attention and media coverage follows the same power law.

Whatever is front of mind gets attention. Attention is value. And attention gets more attention, like a flywheel.

The only hope is to get out of the pervasive groupthink, and out of the flywheel. Find your own fascination and go, go, go. When I was younger, Good Willing Hunting said, “read whatever blows your hair back”. I didn’t understand it then because I thought it just applied to fiction.

But now, I get it. Read what blows your hair back. What flips your world upside down. What helps you understand the reality of the world and the levers you need to pull in order to change it.

The first rule of Fight Club:

Technology always changes. But humans never do.

V. Who’s Working On It

Normal people immediately dismiss things that seem crazy. Nobody is going to push a button to get a ride. Nobody is going to pay to sleep on someone’s couch. Nobody is going to fly in the air. Nobody’s going to land on the moon. Nobody can have all the world’s knowledge flying through the ether. Nobody can harness the intelligence of animals in software.

It’s all a hoax.

It sure is. Until it’s not. And then everyone is quick to forget their own failed groupthink.

But not one group, who has a patent and is actively working on this. They’re called Jovion started by a few highly intelligent academics from the University of Colorado. Give it a read, make your own conclusions.

There’s also that impossible NASA EMDrive engine where people are still trying to determine whether there’s any exhaust or it’s a true perpetual motion machine.