Hell, you'd have so many people apply it'd be scary.
Yes, it's indeed somewhat scary. I remember them doing a survey for this., basically asking 'Would you volunteer to be part of an expedition to mars even if it's guarenteed that you won't come back, and it's very likely that you'll be dead within 5 years?'. Given that there are ~300 million americans, let alone 6.5 trillion humans on earth, we'd have no real problems finding volunteers, even highly qualified ones if the volunteer rate is even in the fractions of a percent. Heck, if one in a million volunteer, that's 300 volunteers.
On the other hand when traveling in a car your risk is lowest as you turn it on, whereas the shuttle is at it's lowest risk "out on the highway" where it travels really, really fast. It's biased toward looking good in fatalities per mile.
To be honest, if you're measuring it by the mile, the highways are the safest place to drive. Sure, it's safer just sitting in your driveway, but it's not useful that way. The most dangerous part of shuttle/car rides is the beginning and ending. For cars this would be the in-city driving. Sure, you have the highest speeds on the highway, but you generally have less traffic, fewer variations in speeds, no routing stopping, controlled entrence/exit.
Fatalities per turn of the key isn't a bad metric for the shuttle. Its the one I'd be most interested in if offered a ride.
Agreed, especially given that it's much easier/safer to exit a car 'mid-ride'.
Diesels today are far cleaner burning than they used to be. A hybrid diesel burning biofuel would be even better since it wouldn't be burning the sulfers(that sewer smell), and it'd be able to stay in it's most efficient zone far better than engines on a standard transmission.
I'll admit that the 2006 lineup does indeed exploit regenerative braking better than when I last did my research. Still, a good bank of supercaps would probably help their performance in extreme stop&go traffic. Heck, maybe that's how they're doing it.
It'd have limited effect for me as my driving is 80% highway. I have a maximum of five stops on the way to work, if I happen to have to stop at every light.
I think that he understands that. He wants to see a 'flexfuel' hybrid capable of E85 while he currently owns a diesel SUV which can take biodiesel. Smart move on his part(if he needs an SUV), diesel scales far better in larger vehicles. I wince when I see those gasoline motorhomes and sigh when I see those huge pickup trucks that aren't diesel.
He's like me. He wants a hybrid that doesn't needs a dinofuel. Well, E85 is 15% dinofuel, but that's still a whole lot better than 90-100% we're currently stuck with. For that matter, I'm somewhat suprised that we haven't seen a diesel hybrid. In a serial type hybrid or with a CVT, a diesel engine could be operated at a constant speed, which they're very efficient at.
Heck, I wouldn't be suprised if he's interested in pluggable hybrids as well.
We convert mechanical energy to electrical energy, convert the electrical energy into chemical energy in a storage battery, and then reverse the whole process to get mechanical energy again. And yet it all comes out ahead, because so much of the vehicle's mechanical energy is ordinarily lost forever through braking.
Most Hybrids today don't do regenerative braking, today's vehicles simply don't have the ability to dump the amount of energy from braking into the batteries quickly enough to matter. Full electric vehicles, containing substantially larger battery packs can do this much better.
Where the true gas savings tend to come into effect is idle turn off and operating a smaller engine more in it's efficiency zone.
Were you really in the market for an EV1/electric car, or is the 'I only buy vehicles, never lease' just an excuse?
A SUV is functionally a far different vehicle than an EV1. I'd tend to think that a Honda Civic/Accord or similar would have been a better choice if an EV1 would have truly met your needs.
THe inflation caused by gold sellers is actually canceled out, because its global inflation- yes, that suit of armor of invincibility doubled, but so did the price you get when you sold your linen bandages on the AH.
No, it's not global. Monsters/quests don't drop more gold, which it would if the inflation was global. The people buying gold are spending real-world money for the gold, which the 'farmers' are producing through more or less mechanical means. It'd be almost like the game manufacturer allowing purchase of 'premium accounts' that give various benefits. One who buys gold is at an advantage over those who can't/don't, which violates the principle that your standing on the game is due to your in game efforts. Some arguements can be made about some of the high-level quests being effectivly unpausable, for those who can't afford to spend most of a day online, but work is ongoing on that.
Like what somebody else said, you have people who are net sellers, making a profit on their sales. However, these people are usually at the top of the heap, only needing to collect gold for game items like epic mounts. Somebody like me, working my way up the levels, I'm going to be a net purchaser, as I'm trying to get the best items I can equip. Sure, I'm selling the old stuff to try to recover it, but it's not going to cover it. As a non-purchaser of gold, My resources are limited to what I can gain through adventuring.
Players like you can come along and get all the equipment you want, driving up bid prices on those said rare items. Oh, it'll always be expensive, but in WoW price levels for various items vary greatly, and by orders of magnitude between servers. Prices are dramatically higher on servers with rampant farming. There's a difference between 'expensive' and 'unaffordable'. Prices for a 'best item for xx level character' should be on the edge of affordability for a xx level character, not 'OMG I routinely get better drops than the equipment I can afford'.
I buy gold and I'm damn proud of it- if your game makes me spend 50 hours mindlessly killing no challenge mobs, or mindlessly clicking craft in order to make money, your game is flawed. Gold farmers are the only thing that makes MMORPGs playable. These mass bannings will just drive casual players with real lives out of the game.
Ever consider that it's because of the gold farmers and players like you that the prices of equipment on the open market become so inflated?
It's like what happens if a country decided to simply start printing money to pay for everything. It experiences crippling inflation(the loss of value of money). The gold farmer uses various cheats/exploits/macros to collect gold. He then sells it for realworld cash. You, the purchaser, use it to buy expensive but leet item. Seller of said item, flush with cash, spends money to buy other goodies. Rinse, repeat, more money in the economy, not really any more items, prices go up.
Thus, if you reduce the availability of money/gold(by getting rid of the 'farmers'), people with free real cash can't simply purchase XXX Gold for $$$, thus that somewhat rare item up for auction at XXXX doesn't get sold, because nobody has the cash, thus the seller has to sell it for simply XX, which you CAN get through a certain period of casual gaming.
I think that the real reason for farm subsidies is to maintain an excess of production in the country. Natural economics would tend to drive farmers out of business until you started getting into shortages and the price of food rose to the point that people can sustain themselves in the farming industry. It'd be lean and mean, but unable to feed everyone in the case of a disaster.
Then you get a number of subsidies that amount to paying farmers in exchange for all the regulations they have to comply with that raise their cost of doing business.
Of course, my idea of a intelligent 'subsidy' would be the government paying enough money to have a three year supply of wheat/corn/etc. Each year the oldest is sold, new grain is put in it's place. Given natural wastage and decay, some of the grain would no longer be considered human edible and would have to be sold as feed or worse. So it'd increase average demand and provide the country with a comfortable reserve in case of widespread crop failures.
I say three years because even with massive farming failures we should be able to adjust, somehow, in that time.
When your company has to pay $50 million in a wrongful death lawsuit (whether you think it was justified or not), your accountants will feel differently.
Amd that's where our legal system is messed up. Somebody falls through your skylight after breaking it with a hammer with the intent of entering and stealing? Entirely their fault. Climbed over a 9ft tall fence with barbed wire on top, got themselves electricuted while attempting to steal copper grounding bars? Again, their fault. Should do like the japanese train companies do with suicides: charge the family clean up costs.
That's why he said 'willful stupidity'. I'd go so far and say that 'willful' is the critical part. The injured party willfully disregarded to the point of having to engage in extra effort to bypass safety mechanisms. Examples are climbing the tall fence, taping a button down, removing shields, etc...
Every time something happens to these things, the company that designs them comes out, does a 2 week study to figure out what went wrong and then decides if its enough to warrent changing the robotic design.
Sounds more like the government is sponsoring the research by acting as a guinea pig. Not a bad idea, of course I know that humans operating mowers do much the same every day.
The warning system wasn't a flashing light, it was a tall fence that the technician had to deliberately climb, rather than go through the gate that disables the robot when opened as a safety measure.
I view it as not really any different where a worker gets him or herself killed/injured through blatent disregard of safety procedures, no matter what the equipment.
Now, I don't mind safety equipment/guards that protect from moments of forgetfulness, but this guy had to scale a bloody fence.
When I read the article, my thought was that you'd have to make said 'robot' many orders of magnitude more advanced before it'd: A: Know there's something in the area that shouldn't be B: Be able to figure out that the extra presence is human C: That it's not supposed to harm the human D: How it can go about not harming the human, and worse yet according to the laws, render CPR/medical aid if said human has a heart attack/falls because of the through inaction clause renders simply shutting down unacceptable.
Asimov himself mentioned this a few times by stating that a large part/majority of the cost of a robot brain was the programming for the laws. That's why robots designed without them could be far cheaper and/or more powerful.
I like the idea of not calling these devices 'robots', but 'automated machine tools'. You don't enter the machine, as designated by the fence, without locking it off. In many cases, this involves an actual padlock.
With all these issues, I wish I could put a permanent fraud alert on my file. The sad part is that my information keeps getting compromised enough that the annual alerts don't expire much...
I wouldn't object to a requirement of a witness, identification, and a signed contract for all credit applications.
Power is still costing me about the same as it did years ago. I think what happened is that
A: Companies started caring more, since they have to pay twice the electricity (once in their server farm, and again to remove the resulting heat). B: Portable computing keeps gaining in popularity, including cellphones and PDA type devices. Less power demand increases battery life and reduces weight. C: CPU's just started getting so hot that more and more elaborate measures were needed to cool them. Reducing power demand is ultimately cheaper than having to use liquid cooling or AC systems for every person's computer.
they only tolerate a fraction of a milliohm of added resistance
Say what? They're not [i]that[/i] intolerant. Otherwise the overclockers wouldn't be playing around with increasing the voltage. Normal power supplies would have to be far better, and motherboard power compensators far more expensive. Besides, if your measurement device adds that much resistance, you simply increase the voltage of the rail a smidgen to compensate.
Now, I am talking about doing all this in a lab, for best results.
The true difficulty comes in that the measurements are highly dependent upon what you're doing with the CPU. Acting as a webserver, managing database access is a totally different from calculating weather patterns, for example. Different CPU's have different performance for their floating point systems, integer, memory operations, etc...
To expand a bit, I believe that they do have some sort of airlock available. I think they're located on the ends(it's sausage shaped, not ballon shaped). They also don't collapse completely, there's room to design the equipment to move into place as the module inflates, or even have an astronaught move it into place once inflation is complete. As long as it can fit through the lock, you can even bring it in later.
That said, with out the ISS's prior existance, we probably wouldn't have enough data about how space effects humans to even be doing this. Like we didn't collect enough between the Mir and Skylab? I mean, a group of cosmonaughts stayed on the Mir for a whole leap year(366 days)!
The one thing I would fear, staying in a giant "bubble" like this... One micrometeorite and pop...
It won't pop like a ballon here. This is a complex sandwich of various materials, including metal foils and kevlar. In most ways it's stronger than traditional space hulls. It's very flexability can make it more resistant to penetration from a micrometeorite. The only difference is that it takes advantage of the low pressure of space, and the necessity of pressurizing for human occupation. It works like traditional blow-up structures. Increase the air pressure inside a bit, and up it goes. The difference is, with the lack of pressure and gravity outside, the pressure needed to inflate it is practically negligable. And it'd stay 'inflated' even with a loss of pressure once it's opened up.
So how high would it need to be to have the top end in a total vacuum and therefore not need any "cap" on it?
GeoSync is 35K kilometers(22k miles) above the surface, yet there's still enough atmosphere there that satellites have to be boosted occasionally. Still, much above the 20 miles you'd probably be pushing the break-even point. It takes about a 150 km of height before earth's atmosphere is thin enough to be 'low drag' to earth's satellites. So you'd need to go 93 miles up, or nearly 5 times as high as the 20 mile tower, to eliminate that remaining 1%.
At some point it's easier to put a cap on the tower, even if you'd have to remove it before launch. It's likely that the tower would be at least somewhat leaky, requiring constant pumping no matter what.
At some point it'd be easier to drop a cable from orbit to mate with the tower.
Is this more or less feasible than a space elevator?
Well, theoretically speaking we could build at least a 'short' tower now, and experience at least moderate benefits from it, even if you're just winching the rocket up to the top for launch in thinner atmosphere. We still have a while to go on material strength to build a cable type elevator.
I'll note that these would be 'zero power maintenence' options. IE you could at least theoretically remove power from them without nasty crashing problems. There are some ideas that require much less in the way of structural materials, but require more or less constant power. Another thing to note would be that, while we could build a beanstalk for the moon/mars now, earth's gravity is slightly too high, so a combined approach will probably be the end solution. Something like a rail or powered cable(see link) approach to get into orbit, then a 'short' cable that doesn't go into the atmosphere(the most expensive part). In that case it'd be used more for launching vessels to other planets, though it'd still be usefull for satellite placement and you'd likely have a huge base in the middle.
Which links? I looked at three of the ones you posted way earlier, one was bad, two didn't mention the big dig. I did read about the carbon fiber tower, and the other was about a ground rail launch, not going up 11km or whatever.
I suggest you stop spouting 'read all links' all the time, unless it's just up a post or so. At least specify the correct link.
For that matter, a carbon fiber tower is likely going to end up in the trillions for cost, once you factor in the cost of mounting the launching system. Making it a vacuum is even better but again adds cost.
Have to be awfully fast irises. You wouldn't need two of them, though, you're not going to get a significant amount of air if the iris is only open for a few seconds. Heck, open it up when the ship pushes enough residual atmosphere up to equalize the pressure.
Problem is that it's not actually high enough to be out of all the atmosphere. At 11 miles high(a good deal higher than 11km), around 10% of pressure of sealevel(11 miles is ~58k feet) remains.
Since gravity is the reason for the pressure increase, if you leave the top open and attempt to evacuate the tupe, you'll have a constant inpour of gas from the top to repressurize the tube. So you'd have to cap it off, somehow designing the cap to not interfere with the launching ship. Don't forget turbulance from the sudden movement as well!.
Now, make it 20 miles high and we'd be around the 1% pressure point. You'd still have to pump the thing out, just not as quickly.
a tube 11km kept as a vaccum? Sure you do this in your big particle accelerators, but there are precious few maglev trains 11km long, never mind running them vertically inside a particle accelerator style environment!
Translation: It'd be expensive.
From the proposals I've seen, it's a decent idea. Every pound of fuel you can drop from the vehicle makes it that much cheaper. Not having to deal with atmosphere for the first part, or maybe only the 11km pressure is of great assistance.
One problem I see is how do you keep the tube evacuated while leaving a clear path for the ship?
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Hell, you'd have so many people apply it'd be scary.
., basically asking 'Would you volunteer to be part of an expedition to mars even if it's guarenteed that you won't come back, and it's very likely that you'll be dead within 5 years?'. Given that there are ~300 million americans, let alone 6.5 trillion humans on earth, we'd have no real problems finding volunteers, even highly qualified ones if the volunteer rate is even in the fractions of a percent. Heck, if one in a million volunteer, that's 300 volunteers.
Yes, it's indeed somewhat scary. I remember them doing a survey for this
On the other hand when traveling in a car your risk is lowest as you turn it on, whereas the shuttle is at it's lowest risk "out on the highway" where it travels really, really fast. It's biased toward looking good in fatalities per mile.
To be honest, if you're measuring it by the mile, the highways are the safest place to drive. Sure, it's safer just sitting in your driveway, but it's not useful that way. The most dangerous part of shuttle/car rides is the beginning and ending. For cars this would be the in-city driving. Sure, you have the highest speeds on the highway, but you generally have less traffic, fewer variations in speeds, no routing stopping, controlled entrence/exit.
Fatalities per turn of the key isn't a bad metric for the shuttle. Its the one I'd be most interested in if offered a ride.
Agreed, especially given that it's much easier/safer to exit a car 'mid-ride'.
When was the last time you were over there?
Diesels today are far cleaner burning than they used to be. A hybrid diesel burning biofuel would be even better since it wouldn't be burning the sulfers(that sewer smell), and it'd be able to stay in it's most efficient zone far better than engines on a standard transmission.
I'll admit that the 2006 lineup does indeed exploit regenerative braking better than when I last did my research. Still, a good bank of supercaps would probably help their performance in extreme stop&go traffic. Heck, maybe that's how they're doing it.
It'd have limited effect for me as my driving is 80% highway. I have a maximum of five stops on the way to work, if I happen to have to stop at every light.
I think that he understands that. He wants to see a 'flexfuel' hybrid capable of E85 while he currently owns a diesel SUV which can take biodiesel. Smart move on his part(if he needs an SUV), diesel scales far better in larger vehicles. I wince when I see those gasoline motorhomes and sigh when I see those huge pickup trucks that aren't diesel.
He's like me. He wants a hybrid that doesn't needs a dinofuel. Well, E85 is 15% dinofuel, but that's still a whole lot better than 90-100% we're currently stuck with. For that matter, I'm somewhat suprised that we haven't seen a diesel hybrid. In a serial type hybrid or with a CVT, a diesel engine could be operated at a constant speed, which they're very efficient at.
Heck, I wouldn't be suprised if he's interested in pluggable hybrids as well.
We convert mechanical energy to electrical energy, convert the electrical energy into chemical energy in a storage battery, and then reverse the whole process to get mechanical energy again. And yet it all comes out ahead, because so much of the vehicle's mechanical energy is ordinarily lost forever through braking.
Most Hybrids today don't do regenerative braking, today's vehicles simply don't have the ability to dump the amount of energy from braking into the batteries quickly enough to matter. Full electric vehicles, containing substantially larger battery packs can do this much better.
Where the true gas savings tend to come into effect is idle turn off and operating a smaller engine more in it's efficiency zone.
Were you really in the market for an EV1/electric car, or is the 'I only buy vehicles, never lease' just an excuse?
A SUV is functionally a far different vehicle than an EV1. I'd tend to think that a Honda Civic/Accord or similar would have been a better choice if an EV1 would have truly met your needs.
THe inflation caused by gold sellers is actually canceled out, because its global inflation- yes, that suit of armor of invincibility doubled, but so did the price you get when you sold your linen bandages on the AH.
No, it's not global. Monsters/quests don't drop more gold, which it would if the inflation was global. The people buying gold are spending real-world money for the gold, which the 'farmers' are producing through more or less mechanical means. It'd be almost like the game manufacturer allowing purchase of 'premium accounts' that give various benefits. One who buys gold is at an advantage over those who can't/don't, which violates the principle that your standing on the game is due to your in game efforts. Some arguements can be made about some of the high-level quests being effectivly unpausable, for those who can't afford to spend most of a day online, but work is ongoing on that.
Like what somebody else said, you have people who are net sellers, making a profit on their sales. However, these people are usually at the top of the heap, only needing to collect gold for game items like epic mounts. Somebody like me, working my way up the levels, I'm going to be a net purchaser, as I'm trying to get the best items I can equip. Sure, I'm selling the old stuff to try to recover it, but it's not going to cover it. As a non-purchaser of gold, My resources are limited to what I can gain through adventuring.
Players like you can come along and get all the equipment you want, driving up bid prices on those said rare items. Oh, it'll always be expensive, but in WoW price levels for various items vary greatly, and by orders of magnitude between servers. Prices are dramatically higher on servers with rampant farming. There's a difference between 'expensive' and 'unaffordable'. Prices for a 'best item for xx level character' should be on the edge of affordability for a xx level character, not 'OMG I routinely get better drops than the equipment I can afford'.
I buy gold and I'm damn proud of it- if your game makes me spend 50 hours mindlessly killing no challenge mobs, or mindlessly clicking craft in order to make money, your game is flawed. Gold farmers are the only thing that makes MMORPGs playable. These mass bannings will just drive casual players with real lives out of the game.
Ever consider that it's because of the gold farmers and players like you that the prices of equipment on the open market become so inflated?
It's like what happens if a country decided to simply start printing money to pay for everything. It experiences crippling inflation(the loss of value of money). The gold farmer uses various cheats/exploits/macros to collect gold. He then sells it for realworld cash. You, the purchaser, use it to buy expensive but leet item. Seller of said item, flush with cash, spends money to buy other goodies. Rinse, repeat, more money in the economy, not really any more items, prices go up.
Thus, if you reduce the availability of money/gold(by getting rid of the 'farmers'), people with free real cash can't simply purchase XXX Gold for $$$, thus that somewhat rare item up for auction at XXXX doesn't get sold, because nobody has the cash, thus the seller has to sell it for simply XX, which you CAN get through a certain period of casual gaming.
I think that the real reason for farm subsidies is to maintain an excess of production in the country. Natural economics would tend to drive farmers out of business until you started getting into shortages and the price of food rose to the point that people can sustain themselves in the farming industry. It'd be lean and mean, but unable to feed everyone in the case of a disaster.
Then you get a number of subsidies that amount to paying farmers in exchange for all the regulations they have to comply with that raise their cost of doing business.
Of course, my idea of a intelligent 'subsidy' would be the government paying enough money to have a three year supply of wheat/corn/etc. Each year the oldest is sold, new grain is put in it's place. Given natural wastage and decay, some of the grain would no longer be considered human edible and would have to be sold as feed or worse. So it'd increase average demand and provide the country with a comfortable reserve in case of widespread crop failures.
I say three years because even with massive farming failures we should be able to adjust, somehow, in that time.
When your company has to pay $50 million in a wrongful death lawsuit (whether you think it was justified or not), your accountants will feel differently.
Amd that's where our legal system is messed up. Somebody falls through your skylight after breaking it with a hammer with the intent of entering and stealing? Entirely their fault. Climbed over a 9ft tall fence with barbed wire on top, got themselves electricuted while attempting to steal copper grounding bars? Again, their fault. Should do like the japanese train companies do with suicides: charge the family clean up costs.
That's why he said 'willful stupidity'. I'd go so far and say that 'willful' is the critical part. The injured party willfully disregarded to the point of having to engage in extra effort to bypass safety mechanisms. Examples are climbing the tall fence, taping a button down, removing shields, etc...
The warning system wasn't a flashing light, it was a tall fence that the technician had to deliberately climb, rather than go through the gate that disables the robot when opened as a safety measure.
I view it as not really any different where a worker gets him or herself killed/injured through blatent disregard of safety procedures, no matter what the equipment.
Now, I don't mind safety equipment/guards that protect from moments of forgetfulness, but this guy had to scale a bloody fence.
My thoughts exactly.
When I read the article, my thought was that you'd have to make said 'robot' many orders of magnitude more advanced before it'd:
A: Know there's something in the area that shouldn't be
B: Be able to figure out that the extra presence is human
C: That it's not supposed to harm the human
D: How it can go about not harming the human, and worse yet according to the laws, render CPR/medical aid if said human has a heart attack/falls because of the through inaction clause renders simply shutting down unacceptable.
Asimov himself mentioned this a few times by stating that a large part/majority of the cost of a robot brain was the programming for the laws. That's why robots designed without them could be far cheaper and/or more powerful.
I like the idea of not calling these devices 'robots', but 'automated machine tools'. You don't enter the machine, as designated by the fence, without locking it off. In many cases, this involves an actual padlock.
With all these issues, I wish I could put a permanent fraud alert on my file. The sad part is that my information keeps getting compromised enough that the annual alerts don't expire much...
I wouldn't object to a requirement of a witness, identification, and a signed contract for all credit applications.
Power is still costing me about the same as it did years ago. I think what happened is that
A: Companies started caring more, since they have to pay twice the electricity (once in their server farm, and again to remove the resulting heat).
B: Portable computing keeps gaining in popularity, including cellphones and PDA type devices. Less power demand increases battery life and reduces weight.
C: CPU's just started getting so hot that more and more elaborate measures were needed to cool them. Reducing power demand is ultimately cheaper than having to use liquid cooling or AC systems for every person's computer.
they only tolerate a fraction of a milliohm of added resistance
Say what? They're not [i]that[/i] intolerant. Otherwise the overclockers wouldn't be playing around with increasing the voltage. Normal power supplies would have to be far better, and motherboard power compensators far more expensive. Besides, if your measurement device adds that much resistance, you simply increase the voltage of the rail a smidgen to compensate.
Now, I am talking about doing all this in a lab, for best results.
The true difficulty comes in that the measurements are highly dependent upon what you're doing with the CPU. Acting as a webserver, managing database access is a totally different from calculating weather patterns, for example. Different CPU's have different performance for their floating point systems, integer, memory operations, etc...
To expand a bit, I believe that they do have some sort of airlock available. I think they're located on the ends(it's sausage shaped, not ballon shaped). They also don't collapse completely, there's room to design the equipment to move into place as the module inflates, or even have an astronaught move it into place once inflation is complete. As long as it can fit through the lock, you can even bring it in later.
That said, with out the ISS's prior existance, we probably wouldn't have enough data about how space effects humans to even be doing this.
Like we didn't collect enough between the Mir and Skylab? I mean, a group of cosmonaughts stayed on the Mir for a whole leap year(366 days)!
The one thing I would fear, staying in a giant "bubble" like this... One micrometeorite and pop...
It won't pop like a ballon here.
This is a complex sandwich of various materials, including metal foils and kevlar. In most ways it's stronger than traditional space hulls. It's very flexability can make it more resistant to penetration from a micrometeorite. The only difference is that it takes advantage of the low pressure of space, and the necessity of pressurizing for human occupation. It works like traditional blow-up structures. Increase the air pressure inside a bit, and up it goes. The difference is, with the lack of pressure and gravity outside, the pressure needed to inflate it is practically negligable. And it'd stay 'inflated' even with a loss of pressure once it's opened up.
So how high would it need to be to have the top end in a total vacuum and therefore not need any "cap" on it?
GeoSync is 35K kilometers(22k miles) above the surface, yet there's still enough atmosphere there that satellites have to be boosted occasionally. Still, much above the 20 miles you'd probably be pushing the break-even point. It takes about a 150 km of height before earth's atmosphere is thin enough to be 'low drag' to earth's satellites. So you'd need to go 93 miles up, or nearly 5 times as high as the 20 mile tower, to eliminate that remaining 1%.
At some point it's easier to put a cap on the tower, even if you'd have to remove it before launch. It's likely that the tower would be at least somewhat leaky, requiring constant pumping no matter what.
At some point it'd be easier to drop a cable from orbit to mate with the tower.
Is this more or less feasible than a space elevator?
Well, theoretically speaking we could build at least a 'short' tower now, and experience at least moderate benefits from it, even if you're just winching the rocket up to the top for launch in thinner atmosphere. We still have a while to go on material strength to build a cable type elevator.
I'll note that these would be 'zero power maintenence' options. IE you could at least theoretically remove power from them without nasty crashing problems. There are some ideas that require much less in the way of structural materials, but require more or less constant power. Another thing to note would be that, while we could build a beanstalk for the moon/mars now, earth's gravity is slightly too high, so a combined approach will probably be the end solution. Something like a rail or powered cable(see link) approach to get into orbit, then a 'short' cable that doesn't go into the atmosphere(the most expensive part). In that case it'd be used more for launching vessels to other planets, though it'd still be usefull for satellite placement and you'd likely have a huge base in the middle.
Which links? I looked at three of the ones you posted way earlier, one was bad, two didn't mention the big dig. I did read about the carbon fiber tower, and the other was about a ground rail launch, not going up 11km or whatever.
I suggest you stop spouting 'read all links' all the time, unless it's just up a post or so. At least specify the correct link.
For that matter, a carbon fiber tower is likely going to end up in the trillions for cost, once you factor in the cost of mounting the launching system. Making it a vacuum is even better but again adds cost.
Have to be awfully fast irises. You wouldn't need two of them, though, you're not going to get a significant amount of air if the iris is only open for a few seconds. Heck, open it up when the ship pushes enough residual atmosphere up to equalize the pressure.
Problem is that it's not actually high enough to be out of all the atmosphere. At 11 miles high(a good deal higher than 11km), around 10% of pressure of sealevel(11 miles is ~58k feet) remains.
Since gravity is the reason for the pressure increase, if you leave the top open and attempt to evacuate the tupe, you'll have a constant inpour of gas from the top to repressurize the tube. So you'd have to cap it off, somehow designing the cap to not interfere with the launching ship. Don't forget turbulance from the sudden movement as well!.
Now, make it 20 miles high and we'd be around the 1% pressure point. You'd still have to pump the thing out, just not as quickly.
a tube 11km kept as a vaccum?
Sure you do this in your big particle accelerators, but there are precious few maglev trains 11km long, never mind running them vertically inside a particle accelerator style environment!
Translation: It'd be expensive.
From the proposals I've seen, it's a decent idea. Every pound of fuel you can drop from the vehicle makes it that much cheaper. Not having to deal with atmosphere for the first part, or maybe only the 11km pressure is of great assistance.
One problem I see is how do you keep the tube evacuated while leaving a clear path for the ship?