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Graphene Spun Into Meter-Long Fibers
ananyo writes "Nano-sized flakes of graphene oxide can be spun into graphene fibers several meters long, researchers in China have shown. The strong, flexible fibers, which can be tied in knots or woven into conductive mats, could be the key to deploying graphene in real-world devices such as flexible batteries."
Sorry, but that's the first thing I think of when a new super material is described.
I can't think of any other technology that, barring a really huge breakthrough (like anti-gravity) would truly make space travel a practical reality for millions. Even Arthur C. Clarke in his "Fountains of Paradise" book alluded to this saying that the supposedly hyper-efficient rockets of the future would create so much environmental damage (pollution, sonic booms) that really heavy traffic couldn't be sustained.
Maybe if we had cold fusion (or something like it like muon catalyzed fusion or zero-point energy) space travel on a large scale would be practical but these "breakthroughs" might be just as far (or impossibly far!) away.
By the way, did anyone see the developments (at MIT?) where they showed a nano structured "tape" able to support the weight of a full grown man with only a few inches of surface area? And it was able to be re-used thousands of times before using its grip? Perhaps the space elevator could be made of material structured this way, I mean if that thing is ever going to be built it will essentially be a gigantic 23,000 mile long SINGLE MOLECULE anyway so nano structuring should be almost trivial!
>High cost
FTFA
"Carbon fibre is made by a high-temperature treatment. Our fibres are made just by spinning a water-based solution â" it is quite green and quite easy," says Gao.
Easy means cheap. And that's what's really ground-breaking about this.
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BMO
I was thinking more like this:
Say you send a 100 ton payload up the tether. After a certain point on the ascent, you stop trolling up the fiber, and actually have to start applying breaks on it, because the centrifugal force (please, I know the difference between it and centrepital force. The former is a pseudo force, yes, but still real.) Acting on the carriage will be correlated with the inertial mass of the carriage, the rate of rotation, and the radal distance from the center of rotation, in relation to the gravitational force. At some point centrifugal forces will overcome gravity, and this will pull the tether very tight.
The problem is not with lifting the island, but with tearing the anchor of the tether out of the ground.