there is absolutely electricity in the air. this isn't pushing towards contradicting thermodynamics. there's two important questions:

1) is there enough to use? (almost certainly not)
2) what kind of effect might such a thing have on something like farming?

free energy sounds great, and i'm usually all for experimenting, but this is something i'd say should be avoided. it could literally be the process of sucking all the life out of the earth....

....to play angry birds.

now, as for pulling all the magnetic energy and radio signals we throw around back down...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJTl2oqaWPs

i've read a little research over the last few years about how mammals actually have a genetic memory of electro-reception (magnetic reception). you hear about it a bit in herd migration, sometimes. and supposedly birds are really good at it. but it's nothing like sharks, for example.

if we had a sixth sense in our genetic history and lost it, it's because we couldn't use it. i think the basic answer is that terrestrial creatures have less use for it than water or air based creatures.

but, we now live in a world with radio waves and wifi and cell signals bouncing everywhere. even if we're not the beneficiaries, it's interesting to ask questions about how this might drive evolution in the future.

i think it would be awesome to be able to sense fields....and the repressed physicist in me jumps at the possibilities in better understanding the universe...

if only lamarck was right, huh? alas...

i mean, who needs wearables when you've got a wifi receptor (and perhaps transmitter!) in your brain?

conversely, this is maybe an area of future research in genetic engineering:

http://www.actahort.org/books/29/29_34.htm

just to clarify, what that suggests is that sucking down the electricity out of the earth *might* lead to a reduction of crop yields.

that's where quantifying it becomes useful. but, millions of cell phones can't be negligible. i don't think we should be thinking of this as renewable and infinite, like the sun.

yeah. just from a brief googling of this, it seems like it has to do with the difference in polarity between the earth and the atmosphere. if one were to start sucking out the electricity, they'd be draining the charge from the earth, which could in theory actually fuck the whole field up. i'm getting the impression that this isn't entirely predictable, but would also require large amounts of sucking. kind of a doomsday scenario, but maybe reason to be careful with this.

i mean, you have to work in the size of the earth and it's rotation and what not. but what happens at the moment that charge pulled out equals charge created? how likely is it?

"The earth can be considered as a big battery, and thunderstorms pump back electrons that the earth gives off. It is estimated that without that replenishment of electrons, the earth would lose all of its charge within an hour."

great.