A basic fact of technology and physics is that a perpetual motion machine is impossible. Perpetual motion simply means that a device keeps going indefinitely, with no additional input of energy. No one has ever succeeded in building a perpetual motion machine and patent applications for any such machine are generally not accepted.
But yet perpetual motion is all around us. The earth keeps rotating, as it has for billions of years, without any input of energy. The sunlight falling on the earth has nothing to do with it's rotation. The earth revolving around the sun once a year is another example of perpetual motion. In fact every orbit and rotation in the universe, including that of galaxies, is perpetual motion.
Newton's Law of Motion that an object at rest will remain at rest and an object in motion will remain in motion, until acted on by an outside force, supports perpetual motion. The universe literally runs on perpetual motion, so how can it be impossible?
The concept of perpetual motion is actually about information. The amount of information, in other words complexity.
What counts is that humans are at a higher level of complexity than our inanimate surroundings. When we construct any technology we are taking materials from our inanimate surroundings and imposing our own complexity on them.
Another basic rule of physics is that energy can never be created or destroyed, but only changed in form. This sounds like, once we have used energy in one from, we should be able to reuse it in another form. It would be wonderful if, given the price of fuel, once energy had been expended to run a vehicle, it could then be used for something else. But unfortunately that is not the case.
In order to understand why we can't reuse energy, as the rule that energy can never be created or destroyed but only changed in form makes it sound as if we should, think of our higher level of complexity as being a "cliff" above the level of our inanimate surroundings.
The rule applies only to energy in the inanimate surroundings. When we build technology we are imposing our higher level of complexity on our surroundings so that our technology is at the same higher level of complexity as we are. All energy ultimately comes from the inanimate surroundings. We cannot create energy as the rule states. Once we have used energy, such as to run a car, the energy "falls off the cliff", returning to the inanimate surroundings and we cannot readily get it back in a form that is useful to us.
This is why perpetual motion is all around us but we cannot make use of it in our own technology. We are at a higher level of complexity, relative to our inanimate surroundings. When we create technology we are imposing our own complexity on materials from our inanimate surroundings. Our higher level of complexity can be compared to a cliff. Once we have used energy, in our technology or our own bodies, the energy "falls off the cliff" and we cannot reuse it, even though the scientific rule that "energy can never be created or destroyed but only changed in form" seems to indicate that we should be able to.
It would be a preferred lower energy state if we were at the same level of complexity as our inanimate surroundings. Our inanimate surroundings is always "trying" to pull us back down to it's level. We need basics such as food, clothing and, shelter to maintain our higher level of complexity. Upon death our inanimate surroundings have finally succeeded at bringing us back down.
All technology is at the same level of technology that we are. Each example of technology has an inner and an outer component. The two components always add up to our level of complexity. A car seems to be much more complex than a cup but the cup has more of an outer component. A cup appears simple but to really understand it we have to understand why the human body would need a cup to drink and how we would hold and drink from the cup.
It makes no sense for us to have a higher level of complexity than our surroundings unless we also have free will. Making use of free will requires that we have senses, and the ability to move and react to what our senses tell us.
Living things can be at the same level of complexity as our inanimate surroundings so that they do not require free will. These are plants. But plants must be far more intricate than our inanimate surroundings, meaning more complexity per mass, because the inanimate surroundings, by it's very definition, do not have the complexity to sustain life.
An inanimate object, such as a rock, does not have definable dimensions, no top or bottom or front or back. A plant has one definable dimension, a top and a bottom but not a front and back. A living thing with free will has both a top and a bottom and a front and back. We cannot imagine a living thing as much more complex than we are as we are more complex than a plant. But if there was it would have a definable difference from side to side.
Our brains are more complex than our bodies. If they weren't we wouldn't be able to recognize each other. Notice that our brains have a side-to-side definition, the left brain and right brain, while our bodies don't.
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