Going Up?

An AC points us to this article about the space elevator concept, once solely the realm of science fiction but now coming a bit closer to reality. The main problem seems to be the lack of some material with the ludicrous tensile strength required. Oh, and an asteroid to anchor it. And the willpower to actually build it. Check out the slashdot discussion of an earlier spacescience.com article on this idea as well.

Comments

You've got it all backwards

[roystgnr]

Do you realize how much energy our Sun is spitting out every second? And how little of that energy happens to impinge on this tiny planet for us to use?

How about matter? I'll spare you the numbers, but it wouldn't take a very large asteroid to supply our entire civilization's structural metal requirements for centuries, and to provide enough mass of everything else to make the phrase "precious metal" an oxymoron.

There's a nice Kuro5hin discussion going on right now about overpopulation, including the question of what is a "sustainable" population for humanity. The answer isn't encouraging; our fossil fuels won't be around in a few centuries, our fissionable metals will give us a few centuries more... and then what? Solar power? Not concentrated enough, unless you've got a plan to reduce our population 10-fold, or pull in extra power from space. Fusion? That's better (assuming we get it working eventually), but then you run into the problem that the cleanest fusion fuel, He3, only exists in quantity on the Moon and outer planets. Even if you don't see the value of going into space to support life there, eventually we'll want to leave this planet to better support life here.

The solar system has the resources to support quintillions of people; unfortunately for us an insignificant fraction of those resources happen to be on Earth.

An elevator to nowhere. Imagine how silly it'd look.

So anyway, like I said, you've got it exactly backwards. It would be an elevator to everywhere.

Megascale Engineering

[tamnir]

If you are found of Dyson spheres, beanstalks, spacehooks, terraforming and other stellar husbandry, check out the following site, full or ressources on these topics:

Megascale Engineering

Megascale engineering is about building/creating or using structures on a extremely large scale, at least 1000 kilometres in diameter, often incorporating highly advanced and/or speculative technology. Typical examples are orbit-to-ground Beanstalks, moving planets, Dyson Spheres and Stellar Husbandry.