Fast Learner
First Post
Agreed, The Diamond Age rocks, and amazingly, nanotech has possibilities that are even more amazing that what Neal writes there.tleilaxu said:
Amazing stuff.
[ot] Mars colonization
- Thread starter tleilaxu
- Start date
Amazing stuff.
tleilaxu
First Post
i don't think there will be a space elevator in the forseeable future simply because of the damage it would cause coming down. In red mars by k.s. robinson they shoot missles at the asteroid at the end of the cable and the cable wraps itself around the planet at the equator. Think of the environmental and human damage what would do if it happened on earth
Storminator
First Post
tleilaxu said:
I have only the vaguest knowledge of the space elevator system. But shouldn't you be able to blow the bottom end of cable free if the top breaks? Then the cable would whip out into space.
Not saying the system is safe, just that some engineering might mitigate the problem.
And of course there isn't a space elevator in the foreseeable future, but that's just on cost alone. You need to be putting a LOT of material in space to make it feasible.
PS
Zappo
Explorer
The mere thought of the loss of money involved is enough to make me shiver, and I'm a fairly idealistic guy. There is no way anyone is going to build something that costly unless it is very hard to break not only by accident but also on purpose. Of course, the safety requirement is first, but this comes a close second.Storminator said:
Jürgen Hubert
First Post
Zappo said:
You'd probably need something like a nuke near the top of the elevator cable to break it...
Storminator
First Post
Jürgen Hubert said:
I think that very much depends on the design of the elevator. I went out on the web and checked out some designs last night. One design has a very small cable of carbon nanotubes. As such, it wouldn't be hard to bring down. A small meteor at orbital speeds packs quite a wallop.
As for the cost of tossing the cable into space: if it's a question of hucking the thing into space or letting it fall on the Earth, you're out the cable either way.
Launch rockets have aborts on them if something goes wrong, and the idea that it might cost you the satelitte you're launching isn't really an issue.PS
tleilaxu
First Post
Like I said, for this interested in what a falling elevator -might- be like, check out Red Mars by K.S. Robinson.
"The cable itself was pretty much impervious, it's graphite whisker with a diamond sponge-mesh gel double-helixed into it, and they've got smart pebble defense stations every hundred kilometers, and security on the cars was that was intense. So Arkady suggested we work on Clarke itself. See, the cable goes right through the rock to the factories in the interior, and the actual end of it was physically as well as magnetically bonded to the rock of the asteroid. But we landed with a bunch of our robots in a shipment of stuff from orbit, and dug into the interior and placed thermal bombs outside the cable casing, and around the magnetic generator. Then today we set them all off at once, and the rock went liquid at the same time the magnets were interrupted, and you know Clarke is going like a bullet, so it slipped right off the cable end just like that! (589-590)
It's burning from top to bottom! Like this white line cutting the sky in half! I've never seen anything like it. I've still got afterimages in my vision, they're bright green. It was like a shooting star had stretched... (592)
"The cable itself was pretty much impervious, it's graphite whisker with a diamond sponge-mesh gel double-helixed into it, and they've got smart pebble defense stations every hundred kilometers, and security on the cars was that was intense. So Arkady suggested we work on Clarke itself. See, the cable goes right through the rock to the factories in the interior, and the actual end of it was physically as well as magnetically bonded to the rock of the asteroid. But we landed with a bunch of our robots in a shipment of stuff from orbit, and dug into the interior and placed thermal bombs outside the cable casing, and around the magnetic generator. Then today we set them all off at once, and the rock went liquid at the same time the magnets were interrupted, and you know Clarke is going like a bullet, so it slipped right off the cable end just like that! (589-590)
It's burning from top to bottom! Like this white line cutting the sky in half! I've never seen anything like it. I've still got afterimages in my vision, they're bright green. It was like a shooting star had stretched... (592)
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