ok, im sure there is an obvious reason why this does not work, becuz somebody would already be doing it. i googled the only search terms i could think of and didnt come up with the anything the same as my idea

so here it is:
i got this idea from combining two things: the aquarium pump and the flywheel.

the thing about the aquarium pump is that the impellor is just this small magnetic shaft that goes in a plastic cylinder and it doesnt really have to touch anything to be turned, its the magnetic fields that make it turn

same as an electric motor, same as an alternater or generator
but i was cleaning the aquarium pump and looking at it and i thought, "what if we just do away with that shaft alltogether?"

so what if:
a disk with magnets in it could be magneticly 'floated' or 'suspended' inside a little chamber, with magnets arranged so that its perfectly balanced and never touched the top, bottom or sides of its chamber? can that be done?

and all the air taken out of the chamber,

and coils arranges around the chamber so that when you put power to them the disk inside starts to spin...

and the more power applied, the faster and faster the disk spins, faster and faster untill... well i guess if it worked it could blow up

but the interesting thing and the biggest part of my question is: if you could get a disk to spin like that in a vacuum chamber, when you turn off the power to it, how long will it keep spinning?

and the magnets in the disk, zipping around past the coils, would that give back the same amount of electricity that you put in, or a lot less?

good idea

http://www.activepower.com/

http://www.afstrinity.com/

http://www.beaconpower.com/products/Energy...stems/index.htm

yay it works!

check this one out:
http://home.earthlink.net/~fradella/homepage.htm

i think electro-spin battery is a much better name tho.

Flywheel power storage is already being used to replace batteries on some spacecraft.

Still need to wind up the flywheel though. Dark energy is the way.

nah, solar energy can do fine.

Not in orbit around Jupiter. Need nukes.

yeah, I was referring to storage of 'alternative energy' here on terra firma. Away from home, the nuke solution makes good sense as nobody is worried about nuclear contamination of pluto.

even nuclear runs out eventually. depends how far you want to go and mass in transit.

Fission nukes will run out of Uranium in a few hundred years. Fusion nukes (if they should ever exist in non-explosive form) might last a few thousand. By that time, we should have abundant power from solar collectors in space.

When distant from a star?

The distance from the Earth to its star will decrease over the next 100 million years as the sun turns into a red giant. Eventually the orbit of the Earth will be inside the radius of the sun.

100 million? That seems too short. But we might have found a wormhole by then.

I wouldn't count on it. Wormhole transportation is impractical.

not to mention completely hypothetical

so were prions!