Quantum Gravity

It was my wife's birthday so we met our friends at a nice restaurant. He is the head of a University Physics Department and she is a psychiatrist. As we started talking he was telling me about studying Quantum Gravity in Europe a lot lately. I asked what Quantum Gravity is. He explained that from gravity comes the basic understanding of time and space and that quantum gravity even though theoretical at present is being studied for many reasons including the many new dimensions it may lead us to. Since I never studied physics in college I felt sort of out of my league even though I understand the mechanics of electricity having worked with my father in his Electrical Contracting business as an Electrician's helper and having wired many many houses and buildings growing up and then working with a variety of computers both as a programmer and operator and have been into home computers as a hobby since 1978.

I asked him a question regarding electricity that had been bothering me for some time. Even though he had a good answer something about the answer still bothers me. But I couldn't convince him that I actually had a point.

I said that I was worried that electricity creation from breaking magnetic fields I felt might be depleting the Magnetosphere and that since  Mars had a depleted magnetosphere it could be an indication that humans or other alien technological life once lived there (even our ancestors) and by generating electrical power by breaking magnetic fields as in power plants they had depleted their magnetosphere which made them vulnerable to plasma bursts and cosmic rays which degraded life on the planet there. Though this is an intuitive judgement I have learned to trust my intuitions in certain situations like this one.

What he told me was that in alternating current since the electricity only travels back and forth in a circuit between a location(your home?)  and the power station that there is no loss of energy except in the fossil fuels burned to generate the electricity. Even though he answered my question I didn't find it intuitively satisfying and realized that maybe he was just too programmed down a certain direction to be able to see where I was actually going with my questioning. Sometimes it is very frustrating trying to talk to very intelligent people about things.

However, he did convince me of one thing. I realized that I had had the misconception that the light from the lights you see lit up by electricity was the electricity and realized as we were talking that actually what we are viewing is the metal filament lighting up in an incandescent lamp because of resistance in the metal filament. And any heat given off is also from the resistance (slowing down of the electrical flow through the filament). So at least in this way he evolved my thinking about light and electricity.

However, my concern about the magnetosphere is a real one and I have learned to trust my intuition over what any intellectual tells me about anything. My instincts and intuition have saved my life over and over again so I know there is something wrong in the electricity equation that scientists either have covered up or overlooked. I really believe that we are depleting our magnetosphere by generating electricity through breaking magnetic fields. However, solar generation is okay because it is like synthetic photosynthesis i.e. it converts photons directly into electricity thereby eliminating breaking any magnetic fields and is therefore about as safe as photosynthesis.