AKLmfreak t1_ja6ep4a wrote on February 27, 2023 at 4:29 AM

The appeal of a perpetual motion machine is free energy. If a perpetual motion machine was possible, you could harvest energy from it and it would never stop, and you’d have an endless supply of energy.

Since perpetual motion machines are not possible to make, there’s no point in trying to build something as close as possible to a perpetual motion machine because it will always slow down faster than the rate at which you pull energy out of the system.

The only modern practical application of that idea would be in a flywheel battery where you make a machine spin really fast and then try and keep it spinning with as little energy loss as possible before you extract stored energy out of the device.

AdCautious7490 t1_ja6gdav wrote on February 27, 2023 at 4:45 AM

You have it right on the nail for the OP. There is no appeal in a "near perpetual" motion machine because the whole appeal is the perpetual and thus free energy potential of the machine.

To put it into financial terms like another comment did. A perpetual motion machine is like a 100% guaranteed return of some value on every investment, it's great because regardless of how much you put in you're eventually going to make more than that. A "near perpetual" motion machine on the other hand is like a really really small loss guaranteed on every investment (or even better a net positive of $0 value on every investment) which while obviously better than a big loss is still trivially easy to understand as non-valuable / of no real interest to much of anyone.