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Space Elevator vs Wildlife
An anonymous reader writes "The longest test yet of the technology that might one day lead to space elevators has revealed some unusual problems. From the article: "There were several unexpected encounters with wildlife. More than a dozen insect egg colonies had been laid on the tether and curious bats flew around the balloons, apparently attracted by the sound made by the tether's vibrations. Late in the test, swallows were also seen swooping down on the balloons, possibly to sip the morning dew on their surfaces." Maybe all the critters just want to go to space too."
How adaptable nature really is. Other than things that really destroy an environment, all human interaction and structure isn't harmful. Who knows what type of new eco system could be in the works!
As a rule, I never trust dark brown ketchup.
No, you fools! It's mother nature trying to keep us from leaving this planet! She wants to take us down with her!
"Oooh, so Mother Nature needs a favor?! Well maybe she should have thought of that when she was besetting us with droughts and floods and poison monkeys! Nature started the fight for survival, and now she wants to quit because she's losing. Well I say, hard cheese." - C. M. Burns
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I don't know. I like the idea of having the connection in a rural area - I'm planning of leaving urban life one day. Then again, I'm not so sure if I want to see those things floating around all over the place. It's getting harder and harder to get away from it all.
The space shuttle sucks, a space elevator swallows.
"There were several unexpected encounters with wildlife. More than a dozen insect egg colonies had been laid on the tether and curious bats flew around the balloons, apparently attracted by the sound made by the tether's vibrations. Late in the test, swallows were also seen swooping down on the balloons, possibly to sip the morning dew on their surfaces."
Sound like a job for Homeland Security.
Late in the test, swallows were also seen swooping down on the balloons ...
african or european swallows?
Nature may abhor a vacuum, but it loves a space elevator!
Never ask for directions from a two-headed tourist! -Big Bird
Once it gets out into space, wouldn't the long carbon tether become charged?
Like the static we discharge walking around the office, any critters setting up home will be in for a nasty shock.
liqbase
... never had any problems with his glass elevator!
Hm... do you think that if your tether is beginning to BUCKLE AND DEFORM, you might have a slightly more fundamental problem than just needing to redesign the robot?
Well, I'm sure they're aware of it. But this kind of thing probably won't become more obvious until they do a 6-month test, I guess. Or 6-years. But the potential for your tether to break off eventually is probably going to be a slight drawback.
He said it best. "You can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, meh, hehe he...hehehehe...."
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Think how long would it take to travel in that lift to geo-stationary orbit (36000km). Let's say that average lift travels at 2.5m/s. And those are very fast lifts...
Do the math by yourself
jackharrer
"an experienced, industrious, ambitious, and often, quite often, picturesque liar" - Mark Twain
Do you want a Space Elevator
Yeah, I think I'm Sexy
Come On Baby let me know
I just want to ride it
All the way to space
and see all the sexy ladies Yeah!
My work here is dung.
That these problems were unexpected betrays a severe lack of environmental awareness. Technology isn't used in an empty space, you need to take into account all environmental factors including wildlife, as well as the environmental factors of heat, humidity, wind shear, long term stress and fatigue. Provide a high platform and high flying birds will nest on it. (Or run into it)
Nature is the ultimate check on hubris as she either gives you walls you can't surmount, tests you constantly for weakness, or patiently waits for your first fatal mistake.
The robot that will climb the tether and reinflate the balloons broke. From bends and crinkles in the cable. It couldn't handle the different thickness. So it broke.
Why are these people to stupid that they build an expensive device with such a critical failure. What did they discuss at meetings?
Manager: So, what thickness cable is it?
Engineer: Specs say 10mm.
Manager: Good, make a robot that can climb a 10mm cable.
Engineer: Should we build in a fault tolerance of 5% or so, in case the cable varies?
Manager: Why?
Engineer: So the blasted thing doesn't break on it's first attempt.
Or was the engineer the idiot, and lazy to boot, who decided to build a piece of shit that could only handle the exact dimension the cable specs stated?
And this reminds me of the show a few seasons back on Discovery or History channel about the pyramids. There is this long open shaft going up from one room, and they want to send a robot up it to see what it is. They also ignored the fact that the initial conditions may change as the robot makes its journey. They damn near lost a $3 million robot in there. It was a good thing the video cable connection was stronger then the neuron pathways in their brain.
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won't someone for once think of the pirates the elevator would put out of work, well atleast they would be unemployed until interstellar space travel is invented...
FTFA:
If the platforms were used as Wi-Fi stations, robots would one day be needed to climb up the tethers to deliver new helium tanks for the balloons (Image: LiftPort Group)
Or how about a tube running along the tether? Or just using a normal tower for this? I don't see how there can be profit in using a tether system as a glorified radio tower.
We aren't even 100 orders of magnitude close to having a tether material that work, yet people are spending their time on robot designs that are a trivial problem. Why don't these contests focus on high alitutde tethers?
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This idea just doesn't seem possible. A 60,000 mile tether, strong enough to carry a satellite sitting on a robot elevator all the way up into space. And then successfully deploying the satellite off the elevator. And this would be cheaper than rockets that send satellites into orbit now?
A space elevator sounds great, it just seems far-fetched. A 100 meter test. Only 96,560,540 more meters to go.
The pollution (and therefore environmental damage) caused by using a rocket to put one ton of payload into space is about a zillion times what would be caused by using the space elevator for the same load. The problem is that the space elevator would be so much cheaper that many more tons of stuff would be put into orbit. So, the total pollution would probably end up being more. On the other hand, we have many more people trying to get into space now. It's probably just a few years before we have at least one private company putting stuff into orbit so the pollution will happen anyway.
Trying to put everything into perspective, the elevator is probably the least offensive solution in terms of the environment.
"SNAKES . . . IN SPACE", and can the porcine Muppets be far behind?
If the dolphins start trying to jump on these things we might need to start worrying.
If these space elevators do take off, would they need their own air traffic control at each one? Imagine a plane clipping one of these things while people are going up? Tower of Terror would lose all it's business.
Can I bum a sig?
who thinks the whole "space elevator" concept is just downright STUPID?
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
Crazy thought:
Assuming ants can climb up the elevator, I wonder which altitude they could reach, given the fact that they supposedly don't need a lot of oxygen with their small bodies. (I know that ants don't have lungs and breathe through tiny pores, but still)
Google "Boron Nitride Nanotubes" - while they will still function as semiconductors, there may be a way to deal with this (but you'll need to look it up yourself :P )
The snozberries taste like snozberries.
did they have any coconuts with them?
You can't handle the truth.
Isn't this how Earth aracnids manage to enter space and mutate. Once we have interstellar travel, we might reencounter another space faring species from Earth.
I would've guessed that wildlife would've been their last worry. I didn't read the article, but did they mention how a space elevator would WICK THE EARTH'S ATMOSPHERE INTO OUTER SPACE! First person to try and build one of these things is gonna get a swift kick straight to the nuts, so help me...
Think of applying all of the force of the shuttle's engines to moving, instead of all that action/reaction cloud of steam and pollution.
Before OBL's little performance piece of Arab street theatre, I used to work in the WTC and I lived across the steet in Battery Park City.
I loved that my comute was 1,000 feet in two directions: back & forth and up & down.
Now, I could live around 4,000 miles away and still take the elevator for about as long as I, uh oh. Walking that far back & forth would be a bitchin' commute in the mornings.
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I can see tethered cellular towers as well as WiFi towers (802.11n, something with some range) at elevations of a few thousand feet -- high enough to give them excellent line-of-sight coverage, but below air traffic corridors.
In situations like Katrina, or western wildfires, these could reinstate the communications grid very quickly and at minimal cost.
All they need as payloads would be a solar cell array and batteries for power (or run a power cable up the tether), a lightweight omnidirectional antenna, and a lightweight communications processor/router/transceiver that seeks out neighboring nodes in the communications grid, joins the grid and relays ground signals to the self-organizing grid. At some point (or points), the grid connects to the ground-based network. Eventually, the helium would leak out and they would settle back to earth, being reeled in by the tether anchors, as slack was detected in the tethers. They could then be replaced/re-filled and sent back up. My guess is that these cost for these would be well under $5K per node, which is a lot cheaper than a conventional cell tower.
No better way to drive the technology forward than to start using it commercially.
Not really - nature abhors a vacuum - but gravity loves it.
Welcome our new Irradiated Insect Eating Mutant Swallow-Bat Hybrid Overlords
;-p
Luckily we will be able to shoot them off the elevator with the laser beam that powers to climber
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
..when you compare it to the support city that will spring up around the base of any such endeavor.
I'm not saying that is a bad thing, btw. If done will, maybe this technology would be cleaner overall than rockets or some kind of mythical antigravity fusion powered jet-pack thing.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
Once it gets out into space, wouldn't the long carbon tether become charged?
And what about the flying ponies getting tired, and their little coloured manes getting all tangled with birdies when trying to fly up the Rainbow Bridge to the Sky... I mean, the Space Elevator!
The world record is for carbon nanotubes is something like 5 cm long. They've got to make a cable reach 100,000 km to make a space elevator. That's 2,000,000,000 times more than we can currently manufacture. At a rate of innovation of an order of magnitude every ten years (yeah, right!), we still won't be ready to start building the thing for 90 years; assuming no technical or political snags along the way (yeah, right!).
You're better off to pray for flying ponies to send you into space if you expect to see a space elevator in your lifetime. They have cute rainbow coloured manes, too!
"Energy only flows if there is a difference in current."
Should read: 'Energy only flows if there is a difference in voltage.'
It's the potential difference that causes the current to flow from one point to another; it makes no sense to talk about a 'difference in current' in this context. (You could certainly have a difference of current, but that would be if you had two separate currents and were comparing them.)
If you connect, via a conductor, an area of higher potential (aka, voltage) to an area of lower potential, a current will flow between them through the conductor.
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I predict that the Space Elevator will turn out to be just like the Space Shuttle; obsolete upon completion. Progress has already been made upon the quantum-entanglement physics that will someday permit the construction of a Transporter system. Search on PhysicsWeb http://physicsweb.org/
Remember the future...
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Here's a quote from an IEEE Spectrum article (Aug, 2005):
"It now costs about US $20 000 per kilogram to put objects into orbit. Contrast that rate with the results of a study I recently performed for NASA, which concluded that a single space elevator could reduce the cost of orbiting payloads to a remarkably low $200 a kilogram and that multiple elevators could ultimately push costs down below $10 a kilogram. With space elevators we could eventually make putting people and cargo into space as cheap, kilogram for kilogram, as airlifting them across the Pacific."
The article answers many space elevator-related questions. Those who want to know more about the project can read it here:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/aug05/1690
There are some technical problems (mainly related to construction of the cable) to be solved first, but the space elevator idea is definitely worth serious consideration, as it could provide humanity with extremely cheap and easy access to space.
Nature is the ultimate check on hubris as she either gives you walls you can't surmount, tests you constantly for weakness, or patiently waits for your first fatal mistake.
Sort of like God, without the compassion.
Oh, wait. There is no God, only some mythological patriarchal Hairy Thunderer, worshipped by the warring monotheists. In reality there is only some kind of feminized Gaia Spirit, albeit one that is stern and unforgiving and seeks to impede human progress.
Okay, I got it.
Maybe the wildlife is trying to let us in on what the Dolphins already know?
Jonathanjk.com
The thing should be long enough to finally get into geostationary orbit and the test here is made on a
100 meters long cable ?
What do they think they'll learn from such a thing ? We have buildings 5 times that high...
Couldn't they make it at least one kilometer ? 1/36000 th of the distance...
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
... but the Apple Store sure as heck did!
I do work on a 100 foot tower and for some reason bees are attracted to it, they're buzzing around me all the time up there. They don't build nests on it though. Spiders build webs all the way up though.
Love keeps her in the air when she oughtta fall down. - Malcolm Reynolds
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Is 100,000km a inaccurately high number? For reference: the space shuttle flies at 2000km; geosynchronous orbit is 36,000km; the moon is 384,000km away. 100,000km seems like a rather stupendous objective, unless the objective is to have completely fueless flights.
Ben Hocking
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Unexpected by who? If you build outdoors, Mother Nature is going to get involved - I could have told the that.
It seems to me that this thing would be a magnet for terrorists, extortionists, environmental whackos and assorted other nut jobs. Any group that can find 20 nuts to kill themselves to attack us could surely assemble a fleet of small pilotless planes (glorified model airplanes really) with explosives to fly into this thing on a regular basis. I would assume they would try a simultaneous swarm of say 20 to 200 planes from all points of the compass at a radius of 20 to 100 miles, flying low but at different altitudes.
You know that ants breate through tiny pores, because they actually do need oxygen, "but still" what?
Would I be able to base Jump off it?
I think it is talked about far more than it should be considering it is little more than science fiction.
So was spaceflight, once. I even have some of the pulp magazines from back then. And that "little" is "potential for multiple order of magnitude decrease in marginal cost per kilo lifted to geosynchronous orbit". When Clarke and Sheffield were writing, that might have been fair; with the discovery of fullerene tubes that are may allow for the required strength-to-weight ratio, there's a lot less bolognium amd a lot more real engineering involved.
Prove to me it is the focus of substantial research and I will reconsider.
Will you settle for a quick couple hundred citations? I can't list all the indirect research from materials science and engineering, I've other work to get to.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Nature still abhors a vacuum. It's just that 0.000...0001% matter is the best she can do with the available resources.
I wrote a paper about this once.
The entire universe is "vacuum" if by "vacuum" you mean the absence of "solid, extended" matter.
Matter isn't solid. It's make of loosely bound atoms. Even atoms aren't solid. They're tiny nuclei surrounded by lots of "empty" space, filled only with infinitesimal electrons (i.e. point-particles, with a size of precisely zero) and the forces they exert. Those forces are what keep other atoms from occupying the same space, and what give the atoms the appearance of being solid. We all know that much around here.
But the nuclei themselves are composed of separate nucleons bound together by nuclear forces, and it's just those forces which keep nuclei from occupying the same space, same as the electromagnetic force keeps atoms "solid". Inside the nucleus is still more "empty" space.
But those nucleons themselves are just bundles of quarks held together by still different nuclear forces.
Quarks, however, are infinitesimal point-particles, just like electrons. They occupy no space; they're just points of zero extension.
Nothing in the universe is "extended", and things are only "solid" to the point that nothing below a certain energy threshold can overcome the forces keeping things out of a certain part of space, i.e. "solid" is relative. There's just infinitesimal point-particles and the interactions (forces) between them. The rest of it is "empty" space. Though as that space is universally permeated by the forces of those point-particles (there's electromagnetic fields, albiet sometimes very weak, everywhere in the universe), and has effects of it's own (e.g. gravity, which also permeates the entire universe), it can hardly be called empty.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
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This is NO WAY that the space elevator will EVER get completed. (There. That guarantees that it will be completed!) Cragen
Private companies working for governments maybe. Relatively inefficient companies whose launches are very expensive.
w arming-and-airline-industry/ I'm so depressed.
The meaning I had in mind was the one that the X Prize sponsors had in mind.
http://www.xprize.org/xprizes/ansari_x_prize.html
They are promoting and encouraging the development of much cheaper launches. As I noted in my original post, that will mean a lot more launches. Even hydrogen fuel has to be created using some kind of energy. Suppose we use electrolysis. The pollution won't occur on the launch pad but will occur at some coal fired power plant.
Of course, no matter how much pollution the space industry creates it will pale beside the amount created by the airline industry. http://vanfossen.wordpress.com/2005/11/08/global-
"It's a simple question of weight ratios! A five ounce bird could not carry a one pound coconut!"
... we could use them to power the Space Elevator!
Go ahead and mod this down, I don't give a f*** any more!
Only 'flamers' flame!
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How do you say "Love it or Leave it" in swallow?
So what you're saying is, electrocution is always a potential problem?
Shocking!
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
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Do you know what damage that does? Of course not, your an Republican aren't you?
Oh ok, so let's poor millions of dollars down the drain on something we know can't be done! I know, let's build a wormhole transportation device. It will create a wormhole in space and time and allow instantaneous transport! All we have to do is try and we can do anything! I'll send the proposal off to the NSF! /sarcasm
Rei has a good point. Why are we spending time and money on the robots when we don't have the material to build the space elevator in the first place?
Using hydrogen instead of helium for lift has many potential benefits. Hydrogen can lift a larger weight per unit volume. Helium atoms are slippery and can even escape from solid steel containers, while hydrogen, generally stays inside an intact container. Helium is made in reactors, the sun, and by alpha decay of transuranic elements, hydrogen can be generated through electrolysis. Hydrogen is really cheap, helium is fairly expensive. Since the ballon is both mechanically and electrically tethered, static charge can be safely sent to ground. Hydrogen is bouyant to ~500000 feet, helium, looses lifting power at around 350000.
Fast machines, powerfull AI, impulsive invention,... All I lack is a good espresso machine!