> Based on the average pace of world energy consumption over the last 50 years, if we were to extract the rotational energy just to supply 1% of the world's ene

> Based on the average pace of world energy consumption over the last 50 years, if we were to extract the rotational energy just to supply 1% of the world's energy consumption, the rotation of the Earth would lock to the Moon in about 1000 years. This is bananas. I stopped right there and closed it. I see somewhere else in this thread that they tried to do that by extrapolating an exponential growth curve through an outlier (the industrial revolution!) for a thousand years. Maybe that explains it. But... that's not an error. That's just bananas. Absolutely insane. Some quick googling, FWIW, gives the earth's rotational kinetic energy as a quite plausible 2.1e29 J (though a little of this will not be extractable tidally, as the earth will lock to the moon at a few percent of rotation speed), and the total world energy consumption as 22.8 TWh/year. So the back of my envelope says that at current consumption we have a hair over... two trillion years.