141–150 of 414 posts
I just clicked the temperature thingy in annoyance because I don't use Fahrenheit and to my delight, it just switched to Celcius
In most cases, 100km is less than the distance between sizeable metropolitan areas. It's a day long bike ride. Air runs out less than a bus ride across town. A 15k jog/hike would put you in the stratosphere. Those jet aircraft that seem so high are closer than that. Closer than your friends house or the local stadium probably.
Look at a map or globe with that in mind and everything feels so thin!
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I don't see it. Why worry about a weaponized space elevator when stealth bombers, cruise missiles and ICBMs exist? If the power building the space elevator wants to bomb you, you're going to get bombed.
Russia, China, Iran etc. are throwing a hissy fit whenever even a small weapons are deployed in the neighboring countries. USA too if we are being fair. They won't even wait for that opportunity.
Because that's all they can do
> Space elevators are actually a possible idea being considered by scientists. > The hard part is making a strong enough cable. And finding enough elevator music... Most engineers would bring up a lot more issues than just finding a strong cable. Also, most attempts with e.g. carbon nanotubes have been abandoned ages ago https://www.newscientist.com/article/2093356-carbon-nanotube... . - We don't have a good ascent m…
Then again, when doing mega structures, a launch loop is more plausible.
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While a space elevator doesn't contradict any fundamental limits of physics, that doesn't mean it's actually possible to build one. There is no reason to be certain that it's actually possible to create a material that has the required characteristics in terms of tensile strength to support it's own weight, plus the weight of the elevator, plus the weight of all the additional cabling. It also has to endure the huge…
A terrorist attack on a space elevator happens to figure in the first episode of the TV series Foundation. https://foundation.fandom.com/wiki/Bombing_of_the_Star_Bridg... It’s about as devastating as you would expect.
The elevators were developed for cheap space travel but unsurprisingly centralized the world's economic development around the owner countries. ie the other countries became increasingly reliant on them and the world segmented into (three) blocs. But the owner countries became increasingly protective / paranoid, leading to cold-war era developments where each of them secretly researched fancy space weapons and stockpiled more and more military assets around the elevators.
So some of the attacks were by poorer countries lashing out. Some attacks were to expose the military assets being hidden in the elevator (outlawed by intl treaty). Though most were probably just excuses to show things like giant robots vs death star.
> Space elevators are actually a possible idea being considered by scientists. > The hard part is making a strong enough cable. And finding enough elevator music... Most engineers would bring up a lot more issues than just finding a strong cable. Also, most attempts with e.g. carbon nanotubes have been abandoned ages ago https://www.newscientist.com/article/2093356-carbon-nanotube... . - We don't have a good ascent m…
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That's odd. The first episode was the only one I watched and I don't remember that bit. It might have grabbed me. A terrorist attack on a space elevator is a pivotal plot point in Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson, which IMHO is a better work in basically every way than Asimov's magnum opus.
> That's odd. The first episode was the only one I watched and I don't remember that bit. It might have grabbed me. I think it's the first episode of season 2 or 3, not the first season. I remember someone else mentioning it, but I've only seen season 1 and don't recall that either.
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There's also the issue of the vehicle on the space elevator falling back to Earth if it detaches from the space elevator (accidentally or deliberately in case of malfunction that stops it from moving up). This means each vehicle will need rockets on it. At low altitude, the rockets are fired to keep the vehicle from reentering the atmosphere too fast at a steep angle, killing the passengers. At high altitude, the roc…
Why is the water bad?
> Space elevators are actually a possible idea being considered by scientists. > The hard part is making a strong enough cable. And finding enough elevator music... Most engineers would bring up a lot more issues than just finding a strong cable. Also, most attempts with e.g. carbon nanotubes have been abandoned ages ago https://www.newscientist.com/article/2093356-carbon-nanotube... . - We don't have a good ascent m…