Part of me likes to thing something crazy would happen if you turned it from the other end. Turn one gear once and the gear at the far other end turns a googol times but melts somewhere around a trillion rotations. Almost doesn't feel too outlandish given a scope that already includes "more energy than the entire known universe has" (per the article) for a measurement.
I'd like to think there would be a way to turn it, but I'm fairly confident it isn't possible. With that much mechanical advantage, no material will stay together. I'm not sure whether the frame/axles will break first or if it would just strip the gear teeth.
In the hour-long video, from the start to the end, only the first seven gears move visibly, and the 8th moves maybe a pixel. You probably couldn't move anything past the 3rd or 4th gear with your hand, depending on how low-friction the bearings are, how strong you are, and how little you care about hurting your hand. You could attach a long lever to one, but that'll only get you one, maybe two gears further.
All this time we've been fussing about clean energy and perpetual motion machines when all we needed was this machine to apply essentially infinite leverage and generate a universe of energy at the flick of the wrist
At first there was God. Then Adam and Eve. Then one of their descendants built this machine and prayed for god to turn the last wheel. Bang! (a big one)
You would need a tremendous amount of torque to move the last gear, because gears multiply the angular velocity on one side and multiply the torque on the other. If it took one newton-meter (about the weight of one apple on a lever a meter away from the gear) to move the first gear, it would take a googol newton-meters applied at the other end of the device.
It’s actually much worse than that because of reflected inertia. The inertia of the first gear as seen from the last gear is proportional to the square of the gear ratio
