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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.
Come on Nature does NOT abhor vacuum. 99.999% of nature IS vacuum.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Yes, it's hard to get away from it all when you want to take it with you. :)
Mutant Freaks of Nature: "Frighteningly Addictive"
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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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.
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.
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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.
Ah, I see that your glass is half empty. While you say "A 100 meter test. Only 96,560,540 more meters to go" implying it's impossible, we say "A 100 meter test! Only 96,560,540 more meters to go" with the idea that we're simply going to do that 100 meter test 965,600 more times. Yes, that oversimplifies things, but it's a half glass full kind of perspective.
Consider: As I understand it, the wiring in the Golden Gate Bridge, if layed end-to-end, would stretch around the globe three times over. Considering the circumfrence of the earth is something like 40,000km, that would mean that we've already built bridge structures that incorporate over 100,000km of cabling. Granted, the design of the space elevator is completely novel; but this stuff is based on modern engineering understanding.
People get the scale of this whole project wrong. The initial ribbon would need to be small and slender and thin for weight purpouses of the initial ribbon. After that's established, we would start adding mass to the space elevator, until it's a megastructure, not unlike the Golden Gate Bridge. Eventually, the dream is to create a verticle subway system of sorts. Access to space would be cheaper than rockets once the space elevator was built up to the scale of the Golden Gate Bridge or the New York City Subway System.
I think it is talked about far more than it should be considering it is little more than science fiction. Prove to me it is the focus of substantial research and I will reconsider.
..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
Probably nothing very different to a good thunderstorm. High voltage discharges through the atmosphere aren't anything unusual. Might not be a good idea to live next to the thing.
You have to realise that the ionosphere is fundamentally unstable, in the same manner that a waterfall is unstable. It's continually eroding and discharging, and only appears to remain there because it has a continual feed of new energy (from solar radiation). Thunderstorms are the most common way for it to dump excess energy. We could perhaps create a small region in which there is an unusual electric field, but we can't do any real damage any more than you can damage a river by standing in it. It may be assumed that all people and equipment near the top of such an object would have to be shielded in the same manner that all space equipment already has to be (since it operates beyond the ionosphere), so it shouldn't cause any significant problems in that respect. The most likely effect of the thing is to reduce the number of thunderstorms in the immediate area (because there will be less voltage around to cause them).
It should be an interesting experiment to put up a really tall lightning conductor and see what happens.
"A circumnavigational flight sounds great, it just seems far-fetched. An 852 foot test. Only 131,472,000 more feet to go."
-- Overheard circa 1903
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
These baloons will be a threat to air traffic. Most air traffic is at "a few thousand feet." You know, things like Angelflight and general aviation and arial firefighting and search and rescue.
Ah your right! Just give up already! why bother trying to learn how to make it work! Feh we dont just magically know how to do something and with what materials so its not possible!!
If you had read Liftport's website FAQ about this, they've already considered this possibility.
For one thing, it would be sensible to have some military presence guarding the elevator to prevent any airborne attacks. But even if it did happen, it would only affect the bottommost part of the ribbon (it will be over 60,000 miles long, remember). All they'd have to do is lower a little bit of the ribbon and re-anchor it.
Your model airplane scenario is pretty silly, BTW. A couple of CIWS (Phalanx) cannons could easily and automatically take out all those planes.