Slashdot Mirror
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
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
The space shuttle sucks, a space elevator swallows.
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
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.
My work here is dung.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Yes, but the Wonkavator was powered by love. Love, dammit! As Americans, we are somewhat lacking in that particular natural resource, so the technology wouldn't work for us. However, if left as it is, the border security problems could one day allow enough Latinos into the US to solve this problem, raising our love-per-capita counts to the levels necessary to power such a device, hell, a whole fleet of such devices! Imagine, a Wonkavator in every garage, and a bunch of molten candy in every oven... the new American dream!
There is no mod option "-1: Disagree" for a reason. "Overrated" is not an acceptable substitute. Post something instead.
Yes, it's hard to get away from it all when you want to take it with you. :)
Mutant Freaks of Nature: "Frighteningly Addictive"
actually, they'd be able to travel faster because there would be more accelleration time. It would take just over ten seconds at 1G (2G force on the passangers) to get to a velocity of 100meters per second, at which point you have 360,000 seconds, or 100 hours. Now with a lower accelleration, but a longer acceleration, that could be cut down significantly. Once acceleration stops, you are back to 1G (minus the effects of your distance from earth).
34486853790
Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
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?
Please sign petition to restore sanity to our banking system!!!
http://financialpetition.org/
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 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?
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)
The snozberries taste like snozberries.
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...
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.
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
No, there's plenty of idiots like you out there.
"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...
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.
Maybe the wildlife is trying to let us in on what the Dolphins already know?
Jonathanjk.com
... but the Apple Store sure as heck did!
He may have meant Moore's, but he gave an excellent example of Murphy's.
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.
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
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
This is NO WAY that the space elevator will EVER get completed. (There. That guarantees that it will be completed!) Cragen
... we could use them to power the Space Elevator!
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin