What roadblock? Everything is cyclical. Financial markets are cyclical, war and peace are cyclical, epidemics are cyclical. Once new technologies come up you know there will be some initial retrace, bugs, slowness, glitches that prevent you from achieving the true potential. Then time passes, bugs are solved, things improved and you get to the maximum until a totally new technology develops and the cycle repeat.
It is estimated that every 4 years there is no one single atom in our body that is still the same as 4 year ago. So it's not a molecules problem, it's more deep. Of course all of this changing is very gradual.
Instead of having the cable to come down to the sea level why don't we stop it in the stratosphere, at 40,000 feet? We could build a lightweight airport attached to the end of the cable that could also work as the earth-counterweight to the one in the space.
There would be a lot of benefits:
1) Since we would have only one (or few) elevator(s), having both of its ends free we could easily move the whole elevator all around the planet. Suppose one country needs to use it for three months they would lower a lot of transportation costs having the elevator more close to them.
2) We would avoid all of the cumulonembus and all the other bad stuff of the protosphere.
3) Most of the time we would already need some planes to transport the stuff to the elevator. Having our nearest cable-end already in the stratosphere would result in the savings of additional landings and take-off from the sea level.
4) No problem at all for 99% of the air traffic on earth (almost no plane could erroneously strike the cable)
5) We would save 40,000 feet of cable costs, both as for the material substances needed to build it and for the involved forces it must handle
6) It could be more easily moved to other planets once we need some elevators on Mars and the like (use old stuff on other planets and replace with new ones on earth)
Slashdot Mirror
What roadblock? Everything is cyclical. Financial markets are cyclical, war and peace are cyclical, epidemics are cyclical. Once new technologies come up you know there will be some initial retrace, bugs, slowness, glitches that prevent you from achieving the true potential. Then time passes, bugs are solved, things improved and you get to the maximum until a totally new technology develops and the cycle repeat.
It is estimated that every 4 years there is no one single atom in our body that is still the same as 4 year ago. So it's not a molecules problem, it's more deep. Of course all of this changing is very gradual.
Instead of having the cable to come down to the sea level why don't we stop it in the stratosphere, at 40,000 feet? We could build a lightweight airport attached to the end of the cable that could also work as the earth-counterweight to the one in the space.
There would be a lot of benefits:
1) Since we would have only one (or few) elevator(s), having both of its ends free we could easily move the whole elevator all around the planet. Suppose one country needs to use it for three months they would lower a lot of transportation costs having the elevator more close to them.
2) We would avoid all of the cumulonembus and all the other bad stuff of the protosphere.
3) Most of the time we would already need some planes to transport the stuff to the elevator. Having our nearest cable-end already in the stratosphere would result in the savings of additional landings and take-off from the sea level.
4) No problem at all for 99% of the air traffic on earth (almost no plane could erroneously strike the cable)
5) We would save 40,000 feet of cable costs, both as for the material substances needed to build it and for the involved forces it must handle
6) It could be more easily moved to other planets once we need some elevators on Mars and the like (use old stuff on other planets and replace with new ones on earth)
Seems to me a great idea!
Bye