It's not. Once something has fallen down, it can't fall down again.

To draw energy from the gravitational attraction of 2 bodies, you must first separate them. That consumes energy.

On second thought, I suppose tidal energy fills the bill. Extracting that energy is really exploiting the Moon's motion, using gravity as the "conduit". Not strictly perpetual, but essentially so for our needs.

I don't think Maxwell's Demon is 100% solved.

Tidal energy could play into it, some underwater tides deep in the ocean are insanely strong.

To generate power you need gravity to move something downwards, releasing the potential energy. And when that thing hits the bottom of the shaft you've used up all the potential every that was stored in it.

We understand most things about it

> It's a perpetual energy source right in front of us,

No it's not. It's a good way to store energy but in no way is a source.

> and can barely offer a basic explanation as to what powers it

It's not something that has power. It's a consequence of entropy.

> It even impacts time itself

You sound surprised by this? Given relativity it would be more surprising if it didn't.

Science is basically a stream of updated realizations that the previous "known" things were actually wrong.

Excuse me, I'm off to build a battery out of a bank of leaf springs.

In a classical mechanics sense - yes. But the waves were detected just couple years ago.

However, they were predicted in 1916 as part of Einstein's Relativity work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_wave

They are the types that would ridicule Christopher Columbus for even considering the notion that the Earth wasn't flat...then after proven wrong go around telling people they had a strong feeling the Earth wasn't flat.

I was under the impression that this is an effect of force generally, nothing to do with gravity in specific.