Space Elevator - Catastrophy or Cooperation
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The Space Elevator
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· Score: 1
A project like this is the only way we (humankind) are ever going to gain an effective permanent foothold in space. Eventually it will be necessary for our survival.
A big risk - what if the cable broke? Sure the best engineers will try to make it over designed, but accidents, war and sabotage happen. In Kim Stanley Robinson's books "{Red,Green,Blue} Mars" he explores the consequences of a space elevator on Mars and it's failure. Those books though fiction were based on a lot of scientific research. On Mars the consequence would be the cable wrapping mutilple times around the planet total destruction of much of the equatorial region.
On earth the elevator cable would be much longer, much more massive and have much more potential and kenetic energy. At a guess you would lose at least the entire tropics, including any other space elevators, maybe you would lose everything (remember the shock wave will not decay with the normal inverse square law, in it may after a point not decay at all and refocus at the poles).
Such a system can not survive in a world not dedicated to cooperation.
While it might require more than two brain cells it is clear to me that the aborgation of the the Anti Basilitic Missile Treaty and the development of a Missile Sheild would quickly lead to an adversarory denying the use of space to all by deploying malicious space junk.
If that happens we'll all be stuck down here for a couple of hundred years while it all settles down.
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A big risk - what if the cable broke? Sure the best engineers will try to make it over designed, but accidents, war and sabotage happen. In Kim Stanley Robinson's books "{Red,Green,Blue} Mars" he explores the consequences of a space elevator on Mars and it's failure. Those books though fiction were based on a lot of scientific research. On Mars the consequence would be the cable wrapping mutilple times around the planet total destruction of much of the equatorial region.
On earth the elevator cable would be much longer, much more massive and have much more potential and kenetic energy. At a guess you would lose at least the entire tropics, including any other space elevators, maybe you would lose everything (remember the shock wave will not decay with the normal inverse square law, in it may after a point not decay at all and refocus at the poles).
Such a system can not survive in a world not dedicated to cooperation.
While it might require more than two brain cells it is clear to me that the aborgation of the the Anti Basilitic Missile Treaty and the development of a Missile Sheild would quickly lead to an adversarory denying the use of space to all by deploying malicious space junk.
If that happens we'll all be stuck down here for a couple of hundred years while it all settles down.