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Space Elevator Rebuttal From LiftPort Founder
TropicalCoder is the reader who submitted the story about the possible demise of LiftPort a couple of weeks back. The resulting discussion was mostly negative about the feasibility of building a space elevator. TropicalCoder writes: "At one point during the discussion, LiftPort founder Michael J. Laine personally entered the discussion, but for the most part remained invisible since he hadn't logged in. I responded to his comment that if he would like a chance to rebut the criticisms, he should contact me and I would undertake to interview him and post the resulting story on Slashdot." Read below for the story of how Mr. Laine's detailed reply and rebuttal to that Slashdot discussion came about. TropicalCoder asks, "After reading LiftPort's rebuttal to Slashdot critics, do any of you now feel your pessimism somewhat dispelled?"
Michael Laine called me long distance via cell phone that very day from his back yard near Seattle, and spoke with me for over an hour. Michael came across as a rather sober, likable fellow, not at all like the crackpot image one would conjure up from reading many of the Slashdot comments. He was clearly wounded by the stinging criticisms in the Slashdot discussion, and I couldn't help empathizing with him. Here was man who had put his money where his mouth was, risking everything on his dream, perhaps suffering his darkest hour, and enduring ridicule on top of that.
At no point during the conversation did I get any impression of a huckster who would sell you the Brooklyn Bridge, something that I was on the lookout for. It was clear to me that he sincerely believes in what he is doing. Whether he succeeds in the end or not, I would prefer to call him a "visionary." After all, for every great visionary you can recall from history, there must have been a thousand others who tried and failed, but are no less visionary because of that. The jury is still out on LiftPort, and rumors of their death would be premature. They continue their research, and as I write are preparing for the "Tethered Towers" demo on Thursday June 28.
At the end of the conversation it was agreed that I would summarize the Slashdot discussion for him and offer him an opportunity for point-by-point rebuttal. I completed this summary (in which many Slashdot readers will recognize their own words), and sent it off to him the next day. He acknowledged receipt and promised an answer shortly. A few weeks passed, and I imagined that he must have decided in the end that the criticisms were so severe, perhaps it would be best just to try to forget it. It was a total surprise to me when a thoroughly detailed response arrived in my mailbox today, demonstrating that the people at LiftPort at least are still convinced that building a space elevator is possible.
Space elevator themes have been celebrated in science fiction and many Slashdot readers have shared the dream, only to become disillusioned with the apparent pending demise of LiftPort. After reading LiftPort's rebuttal to Slashdot critics, do any of you now feel your pessimism somewhat dispelled?"
Michael Laine called me long distance via cell phone that very day from his back yard near Seattle, and spoke with me for over an hour. Michael came across as a rather sober, likable fellow, not at all like the crackpot image one would conjure up from reading many of the Slashdot comments. He was clearly wounded by the stinging criticisms in the Slashdot discussion, and I couldn't help empathizing with him. Here was man who had put his money where his mouth was, risking everything on his dream, perhaps suffering his darkest hour, and enduring ridicule on top of that.
At no point during the conversation did I get any impression of a huckster who would sell you the Brooklyn Bridge, something that I was on the lookout for. It was clear to me that he sincerely believes in what he is doing. Whether he succeeds in the end or not, I would prefer to call him a "visionary." After all, for every great visionary you can recall from history, there must have been a thousand others who tried and failed, but are no less visionary because of that. The jury is still out on LiftPort, and rumors of their death would be premature. They continue their research, and as I write are preparing for the "Tethered Towers" demo on Thursday June 28.
At the end of the conversation it was agreed that I would summarize the Slashdot discussion for him and offer him an opportunity for point-by-point rebuttal. I completed this summary (in which many Slashdot readers will recognize their own words), and sent it off to him the next day. He acknowledged receipt and promised an answer shortly. A few weeks passed, and I imagined that he must have decided in the end that the criticisms were so severe, perhaps it would be best just to try to forget it. It was a total surprise to me when a thoroughly detailed response arrived in my mailbox today, demonstrating that the people at LiftPort at least are still convinced that building a space elevator is possible.
Space elevator themes have been celebrated in science fiction and many Slashdot readers have shared the dream, only to become disillusioned with the apparent pending demise of LiftPort. After reading LiftPort's rebuttal to Slashdot critics, do any of you now feel your pessimism somewhat dispelled?"
I really enjoyed the writeup and the interview. I thought that it covered the points in a very concise fashion while also outlining all the points that had been raised in aa very negative manner. I look forward to following this project and its future directions.
No Coffee, No Workee
do any of you now feel your pessimism somewhat dispelled
Why yes, I do believe my spirit has elevated. My feelings on the matter have definitely been lifted.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
Me: The Space Elevator is a glorious technology that may one day be built by an advanced human civilization, and when it is, it will be a modern world wonder.. but that day is not today.. it's probably not even in the next 30 years.
LiftPort: We disagree. So far as our official road map is concerned, we are on schedule - and in fact, we are even a little ahead of schedule on some projects.
Ok, that's great, but you're the ones making this amazing claim that you could build a space elevator today if only you had the money. Amazing claims require amazing proof. Your official road map doesn't exactly cut it.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Space elevators are only possible with engineered carbon nanotubes which have only recently been envisioned by scientists.
And by envisioned you mean created, because they have been. Certainly not up to spec for a space elevator yet, but they are out there already.
A blog about stuff.
I'm working on a space escalator. Sure, it's not as fast getting up there, but you don't have to wait for the car to come back down from orbit when you press the up button. To get down quickly, there's also a space firehouse pole.
In all seriousness, though, I wish the LiftPort guys luck. I'm not sure how feasible it is, but I'd rather have people investing in creative, sometimes radical technologies than just sitting back and saying "no, that'll never work".
Why would nanotubes be only used in space R&D?
There's lots and lots of places on Earth where nanotubes would be very helpful. A whole bunch of them pay for their own R&D without any federal funding.
There's also more than 1 scientifically advanced country, and they're not on the decline when it comes to basic research.
You speak of Federal funding. This US centric view is quite funny. Why is it not possible that one of the newer emerging economies would start to fund such ventures. China is spending more on space these days, as is the EU or even a cartel of corporates. Granted the state of the art in nanotech is still a bit lacking, but recent successes are rather inspiring.
"If the King's English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me!" -- "Ma" Ferguson, Governor of Texas (circa
How we know is more important than what we know.
coondoggie writes to tell us, Van Cutter Romney sends us word and TropicalCoder is the reader who submitted the story ... kdawson, you are indeed a breath of fresh air!
Mongrel News all the news that fits and froths
I'm not even gonna question whether it is possible/feasible/... I only want to know "Why?".
Why would you want to build an elevator into space? What do you put on the end of the elevator? An amusement park? With hookers and blackjack?
Just because it can be done, doesn't mean you have to do it... There are alot more important and much more useful projects money could be put into IMHO!
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P.P.S. I'm doing Science and I'm still alive.
They want their horrible web page design back.
Not at all. If anything my pessism has increased when I read the spin, handwaving, misdirection, and evasions in Mr Laine's 'rebuttal'.
For example, this little gem:
Q: Business model is predicated on a technology that not only does not exist but you are incapable of inventing.
A: That's true for the president of Boeing too. There's no way he could engineer the likes of the 777 with just the top level executives. He hires the right people to design, test and build these wonders of technology. Rather than waste our investors money on hiring full time engineers that could not succeed within the timeframe allowed by the dollars available, we subcontract. Outsourcing is not a new concept, and it saves companies quite a bit of money and time.
Notice the answer completely unrelated to the question and the 'spin'.
Or this one:
Q: Perhaps should have been managed by a more highly qualified individual, such as a professional engineer with advanced engineering management degrees
Because all engineers make good business administrators? Engineers are (and this is a generalization, I admit) generally too cautious. Innovators are risk takers. Entrepeneurs are risk takers. Engineers want triple redundancy and safety factors. To run a company for 4 years off a $200,000 investment takes talent. Granted, much more was invested by Mr. Laine himself, from his personal income, to keep this business running.
More spin - and the fantastic claim that running a business for $200k for four years implies some kind of 'talent'. Heck, I could run a business for two *centuries* with that kind of investment. (It wouldn't produce a profit - but it would be 'run' and about as effective as LiftPort.)
Q: You'll never see a fully functional space elevator on earth. The requirements are too close to the edge of what is even theoretically possible.
If it weren't for the costs, we could build one this year.
To put it bluntly - this is an outright lie. Period. if it were true - why is LiftPort spending money on R&D rather than production?
Q: Even if the materials science isn't the problem, we have never made 36,000 miles of ANYTHING before.
Roads? Railroads? The SMW3 fiber optic cable is 39,000km long. That's over a third of the 100,000km necessary to build the Elevator to Space (not 36,000 miles).
The SMW3 fiber optic cable isn't a unitary and (for all practical purposes) flawless carbon nanotube fiber. Roads and railroads aren't unitary either. Micheal is either very disingenuous or very clueless.
Q: You need a material approximately 3 times the strength of a (perfect) carbon nanotube in order to be a relatively safe civil/space engineering construction.
That goes back to my statement earlier about engineers. No. You're not going to be able to have triple redundancy, and safety factors. You will have safety margins, and one of our first cargoes would be the second space elevator. We should be able to build that with half the strength of "perfect" SWNTs. We will employ standards of safety. We're sure the international legal community would see to that. About half the team grew up near the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. The failure of this bridge is a standard lesson in how NOT to engineer something for most engineering schools. We understand what is at stake.
I too live near the Tacoma Narrows Bridge - and no, that is not how the bridge collapse is taught in engineering schools. Because in fact, the basic engineering of the bridge was quite sound - they failed however to take into account the effects of the winds. Numerous b
It has nothing to do with the technical hurdles with are significant to begin with it has everything to do with the owner's Michael J. Laine's personality. First off, I'm a design engineer by profession and I've led up a fair number of projects, however going 100% off of my interpersonal skills I don't think Mr Laine will succeed.
There are several things that a good entrepreneur needs in order to be successful on a project like this. The first of is he/she needs to be charismatic in person and in presenting the idea to other people. I mean, incredibly and unbelievably charismatic, so that only the most hard core doubters would walk away from a talk with him thinking "it can't be done". Frankly I didn't get that from Mr Laine. To me at least he came off as combative he didn't show me the "spark" that I would expect to see from a Steve Jobs or other figure who can really energize investors and employees.
Failing that, then they will need some hard core technical skills to work with the team of engineers who will eventually make the technical leaps required to do something revolutionary. This I certainly don't get from Mr Laine. His attitude of "I'll contract out innovation" doesn't strike me as someone who will make a small miracle happen in his woefully underfunded project.
And that's it. I don't even have to get into the technical issues in any depth and I'm already convinced that I should invest my money elsewhere. Sorry Mr. Laine, I bear no malice against you as a person, but you had your 5 min presentation and I came away unconvinced.
d
all language nazi's will burne in heil!
Reading the Slashdotters' comments was really painful. Do people around here lack vision and research skills?
Carbon nanotubes are a miracle material. Not just for space elevators, but also for strengthening building/vehicle frames and nanotech. Any research on mass production of high-quality carbon nanotubes will have plenty of spill-over effect.
Unrolling the initial fabric from orbit down to the surface without snagging is a challenge, but hardly an impossible one.
Tesla was playing with remote power transmission a century ago. There's still work to be done, but all the major breakthroughs are in place.
Speed to orbit? Why do you need to go fast? People used to take months to cross the Atlantic, and the treasures offered by cheep space travel are massive compared to the treasures of the New World. Or just send up cargo on the elevator and send people on a rocket (expensive and dangerous in comparison, but quick).
In short, this wasn't Slashdot's finest moment.
Not a typewriter
Let me preface this by saying I work with carbon nanotubes (as an "innovator," not an engineer).
Where these guys are right on is that building a CNT factory would generate the kind of money they need to get going, especially if they can reliably grow high quality tubes. They are absolutely right that spin off technologies could more than make up for their current investments. But, as they recently found out, nanotubes are very hard to grow in large amounts, and they grow very slowly... hence the current high cost.
That leads to where they went wrong: They had "contractors" working on nanotube growth. It's not easy to grow CNTs, and it's not well understood. It's very difficult to reproduce published work on CNT growth unless you really, really know what you're doing. They need to form partnerships with the people working with nanotubes who are on the cutting edge of growth research. While they've tried and failed to build a factory, Iijima's group has made major breakthroughs in growing nanotubes in bulk, and he's the obvious person to start off trying to get on board with this (as a well known Nobel laureate working with nanotubes). If not his group, then any number of dedicated CNT-growth research groups in the US.
At some point, it would not be a bad idea to let a scientist into the upper management of a space elevator company. Just as a smart inventor will let go of some control of a company to a business person, these business people would have been wise to let a scientist make some of their decisions.
By (publicly, at least) focusing on robotics, they missed the boat on one key technology they needed which would have also provided them with the funds to keep everything else going. Hopefully whoever takes over leadership of the space elevator community has more luck.
I "worked" for Laine in the early 2000s. You could hardly call it a job, as he was employing high school students at the time to run his entire operation, paying them below minimum wage in what was surely a violation of local labor laws. He was running a struggling dot-com at the time, and he certainly provided no solid direction or achievable goals for the small band of web designers and techies that were crammed into his crummy office building with a broken elevator - which, it appears he's still hanging out in these days.
Most of what you see in him sounds spot-on to me, from what I knew of him. He's a nice enough guy, but unless things have changed, he wasn't much of a business leader in any sense of the word. I'm really surprised that LiftPort is still alive. I would have figured the thing would have crumbled by now under the weight of its own far-fetched premise.
In other news, the founder of LiftPort has found his shift key.
I think I lost any remaining respect I had for him when I read through his comments in the previous discussion. It might seem like a minor thing, but if the guy can't be bothered with little details like spelling, grammar, and correct capitalisation, then what were his chances of ever getting the SEC filings done correctly?
It made him look like the kind of person who constantly churns. People like that can't focus on anything but developing their latest and greatest idea, and are unable or unwilling to ever do anything because they're already onto the next thing.
Ha ha! This guy's a hilarious parody of a typical American.
Honestly, Americans are getting out of the science business. I'm getting a PhD in condensed matter physics. In that specialization, in my class, there are two Chinese students, an Armenian and one American (me). That's pretty typical.
You are right that the US government pays for a lot... all these international students sure appreciate their US grant-funded educations when they go home. Too bad our government, in all it's wisdom, requires them to do that after paying for their education.
Is it just me, or were people saying that about Japan just before and after WW II?
it is clear you are working hard on something your team believes in. That should be applauded. Others saying it "can't" be done, that is easy to say and then go have more frito's. It is those who say it "can" be done that move the world.
Unless someone has spent some serious time reviewing the problems of space elevators, it will be hard for them to give any real indication of timelines or possibilities.
Great job Liftport!
And in the event of a mechanical or power failure it would just function as a space stair.
Coming from that era I can say that one of the worst things that could be said about a product was that it was made in Japan.
"If the King's English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me!" -- "Ma" Ferguson, Governor of Texas (circa
It's a rail system, or at least, the economics of it are almost the same. The specific technology may be a bit different. And yet, people choose air, road over rail to a truly massive degree all over the world, even in countries where the rail system is reputed to be superb.
It's the same problem that solar power faces. If you took the cash spent to build a space elevator and invested it in other areas of the economy, you could basically fund conventional private space launches from now to infinity.
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But if we end up with a "bipolar" cold war world, then you're right. Obiviously if one block starts to build an elevator, the other block has no option but to start building one as well, and certainly US will still exist and be in one of the blocks by the time we can practically build one. Of course there's no guarantee that the block with US would get their elevator finished first, but I don't think that really matters as long as both blocks would get their elevators working in the same decade or so. Considering the possible problems that won't be discovered until the elevator is finished, it might even be desirable to be the 2nd, a few years behind, so that there's still time to alter the design if some unforeseen problem is discovered by the 1st.
Microsoft, IBM, GE, Ford... All these companies base many of their product designs on future technology. If you started designing
a computer program around the computers available at the beginning of the design process, or designed the program on your
prediction of the computers available at the end of the development process, the latter would be the better product - suited to
the technology available at the time the consumers were ready to use it.
Nvidia does too. Like, the GeForce FX series of their cards. They were to be released together with DirectX 9. Except that nobody knew what DX9 would support and due to some disagreement between Nvidia and Microsoft, Microsoft wouldn't tell. So Nvidia was "predicting the features of DirectX 9". That is, guessing. And guess what? They guessed wrong. GeForce FX was packed with wonderful features which had no support whatsoever in the OS, while features required by DX9 were quickly hacked into the drivers and worked at snail speed in software emulation.
Sure -sometimes- the predictions work. But when it doesn't, it fails hard.
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They measure their tethered towers in feet? They cannot be serious about science. Geostationary orbit is at 36000 KM. Who builds a spacecraft to go to 118110236 ft? Yuck.
assignment != equality != identity
I know it's slightly offtopic, but I always wonder why a highly speculative and fragile concept like the space elevator which is barely theoretically possible is getting so much press, while space guns, which are cheaper, more robust and don't require any new technology, are practically ignored.
h tm
In case you're not familiar with the concept: It's basically about accelerating a small vessel (by a light gas gun, a RAM accelerator, electromagnetically or a combination thereof) in a relatively short (about the order of one km) barrel / tunnel to about orbital speed. The vessel itself will only require enough fuel for circularizing its orbit, so unlike conventional boosters, a much bigger part of its mass can be actual payload as the exponential regime of the rocket equation can be mostly avoided.
While the capital costs will be high, a space gun is still dirt cheap compared to a space elevator, and isn't prone to be completely destroyed when hit by lightning, space debris or, for the matter, a shotgun.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_gun
http://www.fas.org/news/iraq/1998/05/980500-bull.
http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/julncher.htm
I have a skateboard from the 80's with plastic trucks and board and wheels that seems somewhat indestructible compared to standard decks. Did we use up all the high-quality oil? Now what do we build the elevator cord out of? Can the long chains of carbon be duplicated through nanotech production or does it take millions of years?
The reason speed to orbit is important is the Van Allen radiation belts. You can't afford to spend several days passing through them to orbit.
You also can't afford to put much shielding on the lift climbers - they're severely weight constrained. This makes space elevators useful for cargo, maybe,
but not humans, unless you come up with a Magic Wand ( (TM) Charlie Stross) breakthrough.
Now on the Moon, or Mars, the situation looks a lot better
Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist
And a space elevator will make it all free... A space elevator is anything but cheap.
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Why is it when i read about the space elevator i think of the episode on the Simpsons where Marge says: "And that was the only folly the people of Springfield ever embarked upon. Except for the popsicle stick skyscraper... etc"
Interesting read though...
1: There is no current technology which could be used to build a space elevator. Even if there was, it would be decades before it was complete.
2: There is no engineering knowledge on how to build such a structure.
3: You know it's going to cost billions. Frankly, it's almost certainly going to cost trillions to build. That money isn't in place, but then a space elevator isn't going to be feasible for decades. If you think taxation should pay for it you can fuck right off, this elevator is something you want, I couldn't care less.
So. Today, the only thing you can even plan to do is to generate the cash which might just be used to finance the space elevator. That means an investment fund invested in relatively high risk/return securities, with enough return to allow grants to be skimmed off for promising materials and engineering research. In 20 or 30 years there may be enough cash to get something off the ground.
If you really want a space elevator, this is what you need to do. If you're not doing it... It can't really matter that much to you.
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Mr. Laine and colleagues, Everyone to ever attempt anything truly grand in the history of the world has faced ridicule for it. It is a great honor for you and your team to join their company. I am sure these people in love with the idea of sitting atop a controlled explosion now were the same type that scoffed at the notion of launching a rocket into space in the first place, landing on the moon, launching a space telescope, or anything else their tiny imagination can conceive. At one time all these things were "impossible" for them to believe. Bravo Mr. Laine. I can't give you any of the money you need right now, but I will gladly join your forum, subscribe to your newsletter, and support you anyway I can. Primarily right now, all I can give is my sincere expression of gratitude to you for offering me the kind of inspiration so often lacking in this world full of such small minds. Thank you very much.
Well, just saw this
EuroSpaceward was just awarded funding by The National Research Fund of Luxembourg to hold a workshop on space elevator climber and tether design primarily focusing on systems for entry in the US and German competitions. The tentative dates are Nov. 14-16, 2007 and the workshop will be held in a yet to be announced venue in Luxembourg.
found at http://www.spaceelevator.com/
So it does seem there is still some interest outside US, albeit for entering a NASA based competition. I think that the immigration problems in the US for foreign students will quickly have some negative effect on innovation in the US in the long term. Innovation in the US has always been due to it's courting of students world wide to study and then contribute.
"If the King's English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me!" -- "Ma" Ferguson, Governor of Texas (circa
Hmm. How exactly would they stop China from achieving this if that's what they wanted to do?
Imagine a guarantee pitch your business plan on Slashdot? LiftPort took "a few weeks" to prepare their response and this is the best they could come up with? Where is the PowerPoint presentation? Where is the Corporate Summary? Where is the business plan? Where is the investor's prospectus? Wouldn't they think to provide links to these critical documents at the BEGINNING of their response? I downloaded Roadmap and it is nothing more than a very boring excercise in project management spanning a couple of decades. The parents to this post are spot-on. It is a crying shame that LiftPort wasted such a wonderful opportunity. I would give anything to be able to pitch a business plan to the Slashdot community.
Venture Capitalists invest in a team, first and foremost. The inability of this 'team' to take advantage of this incredible wonderful opportunity to 'Pitch' to the entire Slashdot community guarantees their inability to raise investment capital, at least not from professional investors. Lack of a Chief Scientist with a PhD in nano-technology on their 'team' is also a guarantee for failure. Perhaps this explains why they attempted to raise money through a Reg. 504d stock offering. They don't even have bios for their 'team' on their website! A company raising money through professional investors must include their team on their web site.
Michael Laine et al have NO IDEA what is required to run a business of this magnitude. LiftPort will fail, not because their idea is impossible, but because the problem they are trying to solve is monumental and their team lacks the experience and the charisma to turn a dream into reality. As a result they will be unable to attract professional investors, and you are not going to build a space elevator by selling T-Shirts online. Mr. Laine may be a visionary, but his time and money would be better spent writing visionary books.
The Space Elevator Will Mean: Less Parking, Weird Ribbon Thing, Constant Loud Whirring Noise, Increased Space Elevator Truck Traffic. Developers have submitted plans to build a massive space elevator in Williamsburg! This monstrosity, completely out of context with existing development in the neighborhood, will be accessible only to the wealthy, forcing thousands of average Williamsburgers from their homes and live-work spaces! Jobs the elevator will generate (operators, repairmen, astronauts) are certain to go to non-residents! Don't sit idly by and let this elevator cast its impossibly long, cold, and very narrow shadow over our homes! CALL 311 AND TELL THEM 'I JUST DON'T NEED THIS SPACE ELEVATOR!'
"At no point during the conversation did I get any impression of a huckster who would sell you the Brooklyn Bridge, something that I was on the lookout for."
Well, obviously you weren't looking very hard. All of Mr. Laine's replies are classic hucksterism. In most cases he never actually adresses an issue - just throws out irrelevant nonsense.
No it's the old trick of the paranoid or the scam artist - you can't say anything or "they" will steal the invention, and you can show it to any sort of scientific or technical person because we are all conspiring together. I saw it with an eccentric artist that worked out how to tune an engine to use less fuel at idle and thought it would work the same way under load (he went to the media but was very reluctant to let an engineer look at it because it was so simple there must be a global oil company conspiracy suppressing it), and I saw it with the Dr Horvath hydrogen car scam (he didn't want anyone to get close enough to see the hydrogen cylinder strapped underneath when the thing was supposed to run on water). I'll go so far to say the comments these space elevator people are making place them clearly in that catagory.
In the good old American tradition it's a wildcat mine salted with a bit of carbon fibre technology from somewhere else - if someone buys them out to get their developments they find it disappointing.
They execute confidence tricksters in China.
Been to Shanghai, Hong Kong ? They are no longer a backward agrarian culture but have become a competitive culture. The problems everyone seems intent to harp on about were also indicative of the UK and the US but a few years ago years ago. They will also be about 1/3 of the worlds population soon.....
"If the King's English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me!" -- "Ma" Ferguson, Governor of Texas (circa
That said, I doubt the skyhook is a good mode for space entry. It's slow, it DOESN'T give entry to LEO (where you're below the van Allen belts and can live), and it's incompatible with satellites. Given the nanomaterials, a space launch tower is a much more viable development path.
That kid, is back on the space escalator!
I hope his pants get caught and a bloodbath ensues.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
Bingo. People on the success path don't come across as whiny and aggrieved, and are far too busy to care about a bunch of nerds bitching about them online. I doubt he's really that bothered though; he's just whoring for more investors.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Well, assuming the escalator is angled at 45 degress, and it goes in a straight line (I've never seen a spiral escalator), and you wanted to get into geostationary orbit, at 35,786 KM, you would have to build an escalator that wrapped most of the way around the earth. Definitely not a good idea.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Ding ding ding! I "worked" for him as well, on yellowwweb and Teknology-Laine LLC. Michael is a nice guy, well-educated and fairly charismatic. However, he is not good with direction. His projects drift with the wind and he simply doesn't have the base for a successful venture. he was promising everyone payment in stock, someday, someway. Yeah, that turned out well...
We had a motley collection of drifters there who wandered in and out while Michael tried to find some way to make it all happen. Unless a LOT of things have changed since the 97-98 timeframe, I don't see it happening. Wrong leadership, wrong technology, wrong venture.
A space elevator is a Hard Project. I wonder that we have become a nation of Harvard MBA's, looking forward to payoff in the next couple of quarters, with a business plan that must not contain "we don't know yet."
Any project really worth doing is worth spending the time it takes to accomplish it. And any project worth doing is going to have setbacks, assumptions that were made that were wrong in the beginning. Does anyone here think that the Atlantic Clipper ships happened because a beancounter looked at a rowboat and said, "Let's make it bigger."
Let me say it again: A space elevator is a Hard Project. We don't have the technology, we may not even have the science at this point. Half a century ago, a very successful man said, "We can Learn what we Do Not Know." That man was Mao, and his visions singlehandedly changed the face of the planet. So, I for one, will put my money where my mouth is. LiftPort is attempting something that has never been done, and all of us have been or worked at places where "We've never done that," is considered a good reason not to try.
Even if LiftPort fails, they will have added to the body of knowledge. That alone is worth the effort.
And if you can't see that point, let me kindly suggest that you consider investing in a high return sub-prime mortgage fund. That, at least, you can understand.
Don't take life too seriously; it isn't permanent.
If you started designing a computer program around the computers available at the beginning of the design process, or designed the program on your prediction of the computers available at the end of the development process, the latter would be the better product - suited to the technology available at the time the consumers were ready to use it.
I hate to nitpick, but that's not so. Indeed, that's a large part of what killed the Ultima series of games. The final two were targeted to systems that would only just be on the market when the games were released... and even then those computers were barely adequate. Most folks decided not to upgrade just for those games and by the time they did upgrade the games were stale.
Worse, because the developers didn't have access to the kind of systems on which the game would actually be played, they weren't able to adequately test for either bugs or playability. This led to design errors that weren't noticed until it was far too late to fix them.
Engineering systems to the existing state of the art has the benefit that you can prototype and test the designs immediately and find out if they work. You can't do that when engineering against a theoretical construct; you have to guess and when you guess you often guess wrong.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
The notion of tactical nuclear weapons against Iran seems to be (um) not-unpopular among presidential candidates. The only question is how to spin a space elevator so it sounds like a similar threat. But I'm sure our politicians can manage that as they've done similar things in the past. And it would surely be cheaper (short run at least) to destroy another nations elevator (/other competitive space lift facility) than to do it ourselves.
In 1984, a man named Joseph Newman claimed to have invented a perpetual energy machine.
,created a certain measured
I can't remember the exact mechanical setup he had, but his pitch went something like this.
He used some D Cell batteries connected in series to power a small motor,
at a very slow rate, respectively speaking, the batteries were switched in would provide
a very short pulse of energy.
Hi device had some sort of arms that would maintain the energy generated by the motor spinning
through the use of weighted arms that would retain the momentum due to being weighted.
I believe he had magnets attached to the end of the arms, and they would in turn pass coils
or something like that, and generate pulses of energy.
He went through the process of measuring the output pulse of energy, and claiming that
only a narrow, very short pulse of energy from the batteries
amount of energy.
And went further to claim that because the energy put into the system only used
store bought batteries that it was only a small amount of energy.
He had never shown any correct and full measurements of the input energy to observers.
But when the input power from the D Cells was measured, the power from the batteries
was a few times greater than the energy that his machine put out.
Even though it was narrow, the Current spike from the batteries was immense.
MY POINT IS
THE REPORTERS AND NON-TECHNICAL CROWDS WENT "OOOH!" AND "AAAAH!", BECAUSE
HE WAS A GOOD SALES MAN, AND FED THE RIGHT INFORMATION TO THE MINDLESS SHEEP
WHO WOULD FOLLOW ANYONE WITH A GOOD ACT.
THE GUY WHO CAME UP WITH THIS SPACE ELEVATOR IS ANOTHER GOOD SALES PERSON
WHO WOULD PROBABLY CLAIM TO PUT A CHICKEN IN EVERY POT, GIVEN THE RIGHT CIRCUMSTANCES.
AND AS FOR THOSE WHO CLAIM THAT THE ENGINEERS ARE TOO CAUTIOUS, WE HAVE TO BE
TO KEEP THE SHEEP FROM HURTING THEMSELVES, BECAUSE THEIR TOO STUPID TO KNOW ANY
BETTER.
When anyone invests in anything, money wise, a person familiar with that field is
consulted. Investing money see an investment broker, or a good account.
If your going to invest time in an engineering project do a feasibility study.
i.e. consult an engineer, and he'll tell you if you have a good idea, or are sheep
stupidly following an idiot, or worse yet a lemming jumping off a cliff just like the rest
of the stupid little amnimals.
signed a pessimistic,
no wait that's not right
signed a realistic engineer
You need materials which are NEARLY TWO ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE stronger than what we can build today...
And if you got just 50% stronger, let alone 5000% stronger, you would have a hugely viable company just making cables and fibers.
IBM etc all predicate their work on a reasonable roadmap of the future. Any roadmap which says "And then a miracle occures, and we are able to improve things by 50x when previously we've only been able to improve things by 1.01x" is just not a viable roadmap.
Test your net with Netalyzr
There are spiral escalators, just so you know.
I remember a serious flaw in the space elevator my theoretical mechanics professor talked about. This concern is never addressed in most accounts of space elevator proposals, why is that? Over time the space elevator ribbon will cross all orbits below the geosynchronous "counter weight" effectively closing any stable lower orbit. Now if we are willing to make that trade-off then my issue is moot and that seems possible as the only examples of value for low earth orbit I can think of are high resolution satellite imagery.
Mart!n Smith-Martinez http://www.msmithma.name
it has been explained over and over, that space exploration or space colonization (or whatever) is *not* helping us with an overcrowded earth. You may colonize new planets, but you cannot move significant amounts of ppl from one planet to another. It is simply not possible. You would have to build about (raw estimate) one "seat" in 3-5 seconds (don't nail me on that, but it's about this number) just to stop the population growth. Even if regular deaths would "support" you in your task, you never can build this fast.
Rather build condoms or such for your task. Sorry pal.
I read all the questions and the Liftport replies. Nothing but spin. Specific practical questions like "how are you going to weave 1 cm long nano tubes into a strong thread that doesn't pull apart?" were answered with vague generalizations that had almost nothing to do with the question being asked. Sorry, but the underlying message is clear: "very little chance of a space elevator in our lifetimes"
Genesis 11
Then they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth." 5 And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of man had built. 6 And the Lord said, "Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. 7 Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, so that they may not understand one another's speech." 8 So the Lord dispersed them from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city.I mostly bring this up for fun, but notice the line, "this is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them." Sometimes our lack of technical success is a blessing in disguise because we don't often have the moral strength to use tech for good rather than evil.
... our squishy bodies don't like thousands of g's ... could work for cargo thought. As a side note, space guns have some really cool history associated with them, especially Professor Bull. He ended up being assasinated by the mossad for the work he was doing with Iraq, or so I heard.
"Some of the worst mistakes in my life have been haircuts." - Jim Morrison
> he/she needs to be charismatic in person and in presenting the idea to other people.
I met the guy at DragonCon a couple years ago. I watched his presentation. I had lunch with the guy. When he's in front of a room, he owns it. He's got exactly the personal vibe you need to sell the idea.
I'm not an astrophysicist, so I can't evaluate the project from that end. And maybe in a rigorous print interview he's not so good. But for building enthusiasm, face to face (and, presumably, raising money), he's your guy.
You're right about one thing - the actual building of the space elevator would be insanely expensive. So I'm baffled as to why you think that actually getting things into space using one would be insanely cheap. How do you think they mean to fund construction? Being a slashdotter, you're familiar with the general steps:
In this case, the missing ??? is "charge absolutely enormous fees to use the space elevator, so we can pay off our debts". Trouble is, proven rocket technology is already in place for only sorta-enormous fees. Meaning it's highly likely you'll never get past the "borrow enormous sums of money" step. You can substitute "attract investors" for "borrow money" if you like, but it doesn't change the overall picture very much. Investors will be looking for a huge payoff to compensate them for their huge risk, and it's doubtful that will ever happen.
Look at the results of the Elevator 2010 competition:
They are getting within 20% of the theoretical limit of the fibers, and that is 50x less than where they need to be.
If you could make a carbon nanotube rope which is even just 1 inch long and which shows an appreciable amount of the raw nanotube strength, you can get your 10M in VC funding in, ohh, about 2 seconds flat.
Test your net with Netalyzr
... to justify space travel. A couple of things:
Yes, and 99% of it is iron and nickel, which are already present on Earth in great abundance. Meaning we can extract it right here much, much cheaper than going into space to get it. The idea that the space elevator is somehow going to make getting to orbit really cheap is, well, not very realistic, as has been pointed out elsewhere in the thread. There are numerous other problems involved in space mining; such as the need to deliver entire factories, plus the miners and support people needed to man them, to the asteroid belt; the need to get your mined metals back to the Earth; etc.
Also, you talk talk about coal & oil in addition to "precious metals", but coal & oil are not present in space. Nor is any other energy source in abundance. Sure, there's solar power, but you don't need the space elevator to get that.
Finally, these are our choices? Either mine the asteroids or kill off our surplus population? I think it's entirely reasonable that we could do neither. If we applied ourselves, we could get our population under control without having to forcibly sterilize or murder anyone. And with proper attention to recycling, etc, we could curb our appetite for resources. And we could do all that a whole lot cheaper than building a space elevator, deep space mining facilities, etc.
The bottom line: getting resources from space is not economically feasible, and won't be for the foreseeable future. This is not to say that I think space exploration is a bad idea - I think the scientific value alone justifies the expense of that. But it's not going to be a paying proposition anytime soon.
... that the rails were manufactured in relatively short sections and then assembled (welded) in place. The space elevator would have to be MANUFACTURED in one continuous 36,000 km piece, without a single defect.
None of this is hidden. Laine worked with Brad Edwards on "HighLift Systems" (google it for some background) which did a NASA-sponsored study of space elevator engineering with nanotubes, but the basic engineering isn't that different for other materials, you just have to taper the ribbon more aggressively. You could get a copy of Liftport's book - of course I'm slightly biased since I wrote one of the chapters. It's a mix of fiction (some really good, some not so good) and essays on the basic engineering challenges. "Liftport: Opening Space to Everyone", you can find it in their "store" or Amazon, etc.
Energy: time to change the picture.
Up to you if you need it, but that's not the lower bound on building an elevator with spectra. The lower bound is the safety-factor-1 number, which with your values is 95 billion kg, or 95 million metric tons. That's well within plastics manufacturing capacity of today, though a lot more than the current annual market for spectra itself
The problem with this sort of number is it takes tens of millions of trips to lift itself up, so the bootstrapping technique that is normally assumed just doesn't help. So you could build it with spectra in principle, but what would be the point? Having an elevator with a mass ratio down in the thousands rather than the millions seems to be essential, and that means materials with at least 20 GPa strength. We're obviously not there yet.
Energy: time to change the picture.
I find it interesting that most of the responses to your post seem to suggest the US would stop/hinder other space elevator efforts, whereas I read your post to mean that it would be a repeat of the space race. In other words, the US would be spurred on by others technical achievements, and would invest the resources to accelerate its efforts, so that it would be the first nation to have a functional space elevator.
With a space elevator you could get items to and from orbit for a fraction of the price of today's rocket based transport. While the startup costs are high, the long term price per pound would be low.
What you do with that price advantage could help mankind and save a lot of money on useful projects. Plus there would be other advantages to a space elevator.
Imagine putting weather, telecomm, and other satellites into orbit without having to build them to withstand the high G forces of rocket based launch systems. These satellites wouldn't have to conform to the volumetric limits of the rocket based systems so they could be made with an eye to optimizing their performance as opposed to fitting into a smallish box. Better still, they could be tested in their 'native' environment for several weeks before being 'shoved' into their final orbits with low G propulsion systems.
Also imagine being able to put manufacturing equipment into space, with raw materials, and making a whole array of high quality products that can only be made under 'weightless' conditions. Crystals for electronics and pharmaceuticals are items that have long been considered potential product lines IF shipping costs were low. It could be that a vaccine for AIDS or malaria might be manufactured in space in quantities that make it cost effective. That should be important and useful. But without cheap transportation, costs will be too high.
In some science fiction scenarios, the space elevator could generate electricity, reducing the need for fossil fuels. If this is true, Earth benefits. (I seem to recall that the space shuttle did an experiment with a tether to test the electrical generation hypothesis. But there is a book by David Gerrold that popularizes it.)
Of course, there WILL be the entertainment factor. If a space elevator provides a cheap way to orbit, people will want to go there just because they can. Other people, like Disney, Six Flags, Trump, will see this as a business opportunity and create the amusement parks, gambling casinos and related facilities. Thousands of people will have jobs that are literally out of this world.
On a more important note, despite the dangers a space elevator could pose should it fail, it could also be used to save life on Earth. Building and launching a giant fleet of space ships to deflect an asteroid or comet would be much easier to do from a space elevator. (The technology may not exist now, but we're close in many areas.)
The space elevator itself is just a means to these and other ends. Without it, other important and useful projects would be impossible.
Of course, any world-power that possessed a space-elevator would have a strategic and economic advantage of staggering magnitude over any nations that did not. This point underlies my assertion that the US government could not, in good conscience, permit another power exclusive possession of such a resource. Thus, the US would be faced with three options: another space-race, a partnership in the building of the elevator, or military/economic actions to prevent the building of the elevator.
Despite my extreme dislike for the current administration, I have a lot of faith in the people of my adopted country (UK --> US) and I do indeed think that a new space-race would ensue the moment another nation began work on a space-elevator (or indeed any other appropriately advanced space technology). To be honest, I wish it would happen. A US choosing to focus its energies primarily on space would likely be a better international neighbour, inspire a new generation of science/technology/engineering students, and perhaps even give its population a healthy focus and source of pride to jolt them out of their lassitude.
P.P.S. I'm doing Science and I'm still alive.
When did Slashdot become spam? This guy is a fraud, under investigation for basically running a ponzi scheme. His cover story (which is irrelavant to the actual con) is to build an elevator to the heavens. The closest he got was using the money from gullible investors to buy an office building. While it doesn't have any tenants, it does have an elevator.
He has no research facilities, no engineers on staff (no staff really), and the closest he came to do anything remotely related to the subject was the sponsorship of a glorified LEGO competition, which Slashdot credulously covered.
This is not his first dubius business, so I don't think he deserves the benefit of the doubt, and his history to date shows he's still just a huckster. If self promoting con artists qualify as Slashdot material, why not publish articles on the "Natural Cures 'They' Don't Want You to Know About", written by the convict con artist Kevin Trudeau? Or inform your readers on the vast sums of moneys awaiting anyone who can help the deputy minister of Nigerian tourism get to his hidden US bank accounts?
How does a straight line wrap around anything?
I tend to ignore people who resort to SHOUTING to make their point. While the Newman example is a good one, the use of shouting makes the example trivial.
Some of the comments after the example remind me of the tale of an engineer who was also a science fiction (SF) writer. Way back in 1945, long before mankind put anything into orbit, this person wrote about having communications satellites in orbit. While such things were not technically feasible at the time, they have become a reality since then.
That same person, in a 1978 book called "The Fountains of Paradise", proposed the space elevator. While he had to do some finagling with locations, for dramatic effect, his proposal is a lot like what Liftport is trying to do.
Personally I would say that Arthur C. Clarke is NOT a salesman that promises a chicken in every pot. At the same time, I would say that a lot of his visions have turned into reality. (Of course, with any SF writing, a lot other visions have been left by the wayside. But that is a fact of life when dealing with SF.)
When investing time in an engineering project, also remember to research the history of the idea as part of the feasibility study. A ten minute search on Google using "space elevator" as the search term, uncovers several articles referencing Clarke. (I speed read. Your results may vary.)
Note that with a space elevator, you could put up satellites that have lots of extra fuel for making orbital adjustments. The lower cost of putting them into orbit would allow you to have bigger fuel tanks.
For that matter, if you had a space elevator support fleet of ships that could help satellites make orbital adjustments, you wouldn't have to include that hardware in the original satellites. This support fleet could also be used to safely remove satellites that are obsolete or not working.
Do note that other methods like roads are heavily subsidized. For example, before I got my second car, the portion of my property taxes dedicated to transportion were more than I paid out in state and Federal gas taxes.
Remember that when voting for transportation related bond issues. Even if you don't leave your home, you may be paying for the roads.
WTF? As if this kite-on-steroids idea isn't daft enough to start with, they're going to attach it to a boat?
Actually a boat, really a large floating platform, would be better to anchor a space elevator to than the ground. Whereas the ground is "unmovable" without a considerable amount of resources, a floating platform can easily move a short distance.
FalconShould there be a Law?
The balance of world economic power is shifting to the East because the East isn't economically handicapping itself as much as it used to. That reduces relative dominance of the US but does not affect the US' ability to support any particular project, including a space elevator. The pie is radically growing because 2 billion people are being progressively freed of their economic bondage. That's unalloyed good news no matter where you are.
correction: they execute confidence tricksters who have paid insufficient bribes in the PRC.
Ok, that's great, but you're the ones making this amazing claim that you could build a space elevator today if only you had the money. Amazing claims require amazing proof. Your official road map doesn't exactly cut it.
I must of missed something, I didn't see where he said they could build an elevator today. Instead I specifically recall he stated that they were loooking at 25 years before they got it off the ground.
FalconShould there be a Law?
We really need to get our act together WHILE we venture forth into space.
We already know about the fallacies of keeping our eggs in one basket. It would be one of the universe's biggest ironies if we held off colonizing other planets and even other solar systems because we achieved societal perfection and then got wiped out due to an asteroid, comet or nearby novae.
Do note that many of the problems we have today have been problems for thousands of years. In some instances those problems were temporarily remedied by frontiers that allowed people to flee and begin again. Space can be that frontier.
In other instances, some problems are embedded in our societal makeup and are hard to fix. Having 'social experiments' like those necessary to deal with personnel on things like the Mars Mission could enable people to understand those embedded aspects and figure out ways to make them work to the benefit of people.
Also note that some problems, like energy production and raw material mining, could benefit by looking outward into space. One asteroid of the proper composition could reduce the need to mine thousands of acres and generate megatons of liquid and air based pollution. (Of course, the Earth based miners and related people would need to find jobs. But some could find those jobs in space.)
When you get down to it, blindly believing that any single set of technologies can fix any or all of our problems is foolish. At the same time, blindly ignoring technologies because 'we need to get our act together first' is also foolish.
It's a good thing people like you never got involved in bridge projects, because we'd all be using ferries every time we wanted to cross a river.
"Proven" rocket technology still hasn't been proven to be all that safe, just like boats still aren't anywhere near as safe as bridges.
They need all those well-educated people outside the US in order to outsource higher-qualified jobs into cheaper countries. That outsourcing help US companies to save money and therefore be more profitable. So it's absolutely logical to not keep those foreign students in the US where they ultimately would want to get US wages.
Has anyone ever contemplated the scenerio of atmosphere wicking if one of these things were successful? (Could that be possible?) And people think the ozone hole is bad.
Let me qualify my statement. I am a professor of chemistry at a top ten school in the US. The materials-related claims that are made in the rebuttal are far-fetched. How can the interviewee state that 'we could build one today' if we can, at best, produce several grams of CNTs using the Smalley technology, which is probably as good as it gets right now. Where would the other nanotubes come from? Aliens? I agree that this is science fiction not science. Chance favors the prepared mind and this is a case that, as many readers have pointed out, is best characterized by a group of developers waiting for miracles to spontaneously occur.
For the preliminary stages, doing measurements in feet is perfectly fine. You have to get off the ground before you fly.
The space elevator is still in the Wright Brother's level of technology relatively speaking. Getting to 500 feet was equal to the Wright Brother's first successful powered flight. Getting to 100,000 feet would be like the DC3, something that could be useful for such things as wide area communications that are NOT satellite dependent.
Note that a relatively famous flying machine, called SpaceShipOne, had the call letters N328KF. That stands for 328,000 feet, or 328 kilofeet, the edge of space. If measuring in feet is good enough for them, it is good enough for me.
I suspect we will see measurements in kilometers when the measurements hit the hundreds of kilometer range. But for the American audience, and potential American investors, using feet and eventually miles is acceptable.
Not at the equator. Which is where this would be. Storms are driven by temperature differentials and Coriolis acceleration, which are both pretty much zero at the equator in the middle of the ocean.
I feel I need to point out something to you though, many of the hurricanes that hit the US originate in the southern hemisphere off the coast of Africa. To hit the US they have to cross the equator.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Handwavium? Not strong enough. We need Unobtainium.
I thought Unobtainium was only useful for going to the center of the earth.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Curtis? Tim? I'm wondering if I "worked" with you on YelloWWWeb. My name's Jeff. I came in shortly after his site had been broken into. Brought everything back online, got the site running. The last person in there couldn't figure out how to install RedHat on the frontend server, what a joke. From there on out, it was never exactly clear cut what he wanted us to do. The most I ever got resembling a request was to set up a webmail/groupware system for "customers to communicate." I asked what that meant. No real answer from him. How was I supposed to build it then?
I was one of those high school kids. I knew enough to get along, but unless he told me what he wanted, I couldn't whip up a magical solution for him. I remember him asking me to set up a CVS repository. For what? No code was being written for anything. The only coder there was still reading his "PHP in a Nutshell" book. I left.
My favorite thing of all was the Compaq Proliant servers that were stacked up on a "rack" of 2x4s.
I saw the comment how you saw it. If another country were poised to field a viable space elevator, the U.S. would increase their efforts to be the first.
However, more likely, if another country were to try to field a space elevator, the U.S. would probably be caught playing catch-up and achieve the status of second place. At this point, they would probably find some other challenge to be first at and spin that as the important milestone.
Ask the average American who was the first man in space, and their response is more likely to be Neil Armstrong than Yuri Gagarin.
You can't forbid people to have kids, but there's a much simpler way to ensure they never have any (no, not neuter them).
Sure you can, the US governemnt did this in a way to Native American Indians. In a system that only ended in the 1970s doctors working for the IHS, Indian Health Service, sterlized female Indians. Sometimes it was done without the knowledge or consent of them and other tymes they were led to believe they had to have it done. Forced sterilization is ethnic cleansing of Indians.
You see, population grows, and all of that growth is coming from poor countries, and poor ghettos in richer countries. Truth is, in a modern society, the more educated you are, the better off you are, the more better off you want your kids to be, have access to birth control measures, and eventually have less kids, sometimes even have no kids.
That's right, the better people's educational and economic situation and the greater the opportunities women have, the lower the birthrate is for the population. That's why the two nations that had the highest birth rates, China and India, have seen their birthrates drop. Meanwhile in developed nations, parts of the EU, Japan, and the USA the birthrate has dropped below the replacement rate needed to keep the same population. If it wasn't for immigrants their populations would colapse. A few years ago the mayor of one town in Italy instituded a tax on singles because their population was falling and he wanted singles to get married and have children. Which is the absolute worse thing he could of done, instead of having singles get married this would drive them away which would make it worse. The worst place for population growth now is Africa which doesn't have nearly enough opportunity for the population as most other places.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Spiral escalator? Just talk to NYC's mayor. He put one in his building.
r g_lps_death_spiral.php
http://www.curbed.com/archives/2004/09/29/bloombe
how exactly how you going to make everyone on Earth rich enough to become educated enough to reduce population growth?
Improve education and educational opportunities. Mexico has a program now that pays a monthly stipend for some who keep their children in school. After Mexico started it Brazil picked up on it and does the same. Another way to increase third world per capita income is for the first world, specifically the EU, Japan, and the US to stop paying thier agribusinesses hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies as well as get rid of trade barries and tariffs. Because these nations give their agribusinesses all this money they are able to export their produce to third world nations where they can sale food for less than it costs farmers in those countries to farm. This is one reason "millions of illegal imigrants" are in and more are trying to get into the US. Because of farm subsidies and NAFTA US agribusiness can sale food in Mexico cheap. This drives Mexican farmers off their farms, and there's not many places they can go to make a better life.
FalconShould there be a Law?
It might seem like a minor thing, but if the guy can't be bothered with little details like spelling, grammar, and correct capitalisation, then what were his chances of ever getting the SEC filings done correctly?
While I believe being able to write correctly is important it's not really needed for him to make SEC filings. Experts such as acccountants will be the ones who actually fillout the paperwork. If Businesses and people were expected to do their one paperwork my sister, who as a CPA runs her own accounting business, would be out of work. Lawyer and others would probably go over the paperwork to make sure it was accurate.
FalconShould there be a Law?
You did see the news over at spacex? It sounds like the feds liked what they saw. But, yes, that is one heck of a schedule. It will be cool if they can stick to it, but....
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
A really cheap way to lift stuff to 100,000 Km orbit does render nuclear weapons, IBMs and missile defense obsolete.
Space elevator will lift YOU!... umm, wait a sec...
I didn't say it was a reason not to do it, I just said that the "Woohoo! Here's an insanely cheap way into orbit" argument wasn't a reason *to* do it. Are your bridge tolls "insanely cheap" from the day of their opening? As a potential investor, I want those tolls to be as high as the market will bear.