Suppose that instead of someone else growing steak in a lab for you, and you having to guess whether this mystery meat was truly lab grown or not, that instead you are able to buy a tiny quantity of seed culture for 100 different things (e.g. the 100 finest varieties of steak, or the 100 finest kinds of gourmet coffee beans, the tastiest spice plant leaves, etc...) and suppose you can choose to grow these things yourself in your own grower, process them yourself, etc.
Suddenly, it may be possible to eat much better food than before, and you choose to eat only what you like. Stuff that you would not have been able to afford before you can suddenly have every day. Further, you wouldn't have to drive a car to 50 places to get all of your food.
Now, suppose (since we are already supposing) that a food grower were to go down in price and become affordable. Then, if oil prices keep going up, growing your own food eventually becomes cheaper than transporting it from somewhere else.
Ask yourself: do you benefit from software patents?
I know I don't, especially in light of the quality of the latest "innovations" that are really just a reworded version of the same junk. Software patents have only been a hindrance to me. They're only a bane and a bother to 99.9999% of the population. Why should almost everyone's time be wasted with increasingly ridiculous nonsense that benefits almost no one, stifles technology use and acceptance and doesn't really succeed in identifying and rewarding all of the innovators? Even the officially sanctioned innovators don't receive that much in return once all of the lawyers and filings and other administrative overhead eat up the profits. So, it benefits only a few people and the rest of us bear the costs in the form of wastes of time, service interruptions, higher product and service costs, responding to legal claims, etc.
Does an art museum interrupt and charge a painter for each brushstroke that resembles someone else's painting? It's not worth their time. Similarly, software patents are not worth our time at the level they want to enforce them. Instead it just costs us an environment in which to innovate freely.
This smells like a troll, but I'll bite, because you have come up with a criticism that may be valid.
[Kurzweil has] an absence of a sound moral position which accounts for the possibility of mis-use, which I find uncomfortable.
Keep in mind, first of all, that a lack of a moral compass and militancy are two different things. A militant technologist usually is trying to get you to buy something or remember a brand name, whereas an morally-neutral futurist may have no such goal, other than simply wanting to explore what the future may bring so as to begin to determine what may be good or bad.
It isn't always possible, except through hindsight, to determine what will turn out to be good or bad in the long run. What is bad today may be good tomorrow, in terms of technology, or vice-versa. So, morally speaking, it is somewhat democratic to share dreams and aspirations with the public, so that fewer people can be surprised by it when it arrives, and a moral consensus can build more quickly when it is necessary.
If you would rather that people remain ignorant about future possibilities, then I would argue that you are more militant than he is.
if we mined that much mass from the moon and used it on earth...
Given the blindspot for Tragedies of the Commons, I suppose we should count ourselves lucky that bringing that much in moon materials here would be outrageously expensive. It would be even harder to breathe with the extra gravity...
But, in response to the GP, it isn't a given that moving stuff off the moon would cause the moon's orbit to change; it depends what the destination is -- it doesn't have to be Earth. You could mine it and use it for something without bringing it here.
If the mass is to be used for a power station placed in lunar orbit, for example, there would likely be no net change. Also, if we had the requisite magical powers, we could split the moon in half and place the halves in opposing orbits, or have four moons, or crumble it down into a continuous ring. There would be no benefit to doing so, but the point is that an orbital balance can be achieved even with large masses. (Not that there wouldn't be other side effects. Replacing the moon with a continuous ring would get rid of tides, which coastal wildlife needs for its survival (particularly coral reef habitats)).
If the worry is about foam banging into the shuttle, then a concentric system of interconnected collapsible steel wire fences could help. Not that it will keep foam from hitting the shuttle, it could be travelling way too fast -- the idea is to slow it down and reduce the spin rate so the worst of the damage is avoided.
(Then again, why bother adding more systems to the shuttle at all, since it is going to be replaced by something that will be placed at the top of a rocket -- out of reach of projectiles. The idea of launching cargo on cheap if risky launch platforms and people separately on safety-optimized vehicles is a far saner approach.)
(I'm finding it so hard to abstain from commenting on the wisdom of replacing marvelously stable and transparent file systems with databases... I guess I'll try this time.)
As database operations become more commonplace, even the average user will "benefit" from this. I place it in quotes because it was a problem that didn't need solving prior to the "use databases to manage your buddy list" mentality.
There are probably other, saner uses for it though, although people will have to weigh this benefit against the cost of creating another dependency on their system for a specific library tied to specific hardware, and the concerns of what happens when some of the parts are upgraded but not the others....
Re:Skycar efficiency and pollution
on
NextFest 2005
·
· Score: 1
"at 20 mpg even with gasoline engines, it isn't hurting the environmnet nearly as much as cars"
Only in the sense that, say, in a place like Alaska or Brazil, you might be able to avoid building roads in the first place by using only this kind of vehicle there. It wouldn't be able to carry heavy loads though, so getting cargo in and out of those places would still be expensive.
For emissions, consider that the mileage figures given are probably the very ideal case. They might not include takeoff and landing, for instance, or they may be reflecting what the longest possible trip after takeoff would use. For short commutes, I'll bet the mileage figures will be as bad as an SUV, especially in a VTOL flight.
Then, ask yourself what speed the Skycar drivers will actually cruise at. Will everyone obediently drive at the ideal efficient cruising speed, just like everyone drives at 55 mph today, or will everyone want to floor it and go at 350+ top speed?
Not too exciting
on
NextFest 2005
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I think the future is going to demand more inventiveness than what I see there. A Skycar is efficient transportation? A Hydrogen powered Hummer is efficient transportation?
Some of these things may sound fun, but unless some basic thinking starts to change I think what we're actually going to need is a farm that picks up and moves as climate change happens, artificial noses to breathe oxygen depleted air and so forth.
to share articles over a P2P protocol. Right now it is just an app that stores content offline. With proper checksumming, it could change the way the content is delivered and reduce Wikipedia's bandwidth bill significantly.
parsing text is one of the hardest things for a modern processor to do
Is it harder than going to disk to load pages from a hugely bloated object-handling library? Even if it isn't bloated today, it will be, because you do not have control over the source.
Objects are fine for complex graphical junk. For parsing process statistics and such object instances and their attendant memory handling overhead are overkill.
There was no mention of TPM in the summary. Only a line about an i945G driver.
However, sourceforge lists a new TPM device driver at http://sourceforge.net/projects/tpmdd. It is a set of patches which add TPM support to pre-2.6.12 kernels.
It seems like every single planet they have discovered they have branded as earthlike. So now when they do find something earthlike (with oceans of water and not boiling sulfuric acid or something), it will be ignored by people as so much wolf-calling.
Other planets were gas giants, but they were called "Earthlike." This one sounds like it is close enough to its star that the surface could melt lead. Not exactly a good place to set up a tent.
"Earthlike planet" seems to simply mean "planet" the way they use it. Had they discovered a floating ice cube beyond Pluto, they would have called that "the next planet." If there is a speck flying around nearby, they call it a killer asteroid, and if a killer asteroid passes by without crashing they say "whew, that was close, we didn't see that until it passed by."
Reminds me of:
Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she laid an asteroid. --Mark Twain
While IE certainly proliferated quickly, in most cases that wasn't because of an explicit decision by each consumer to download it as some new thing that hadn't been there before and then take the trouble to install it and learn how to use it.
Most people got IE already installed with their operating system, and they got that with the computer they purchased. Their ISP software may have included it in a bundle in some cases. Just having IE should not be interpreted as a statement of preference.
The name "explorer" is found in a lot of other products, but we see no trademark issues for some reason... Maybe FF should be called "Internet Firefox," that is, unless someone owns a trademark for "Internet," or for the space between words.:)
Just saw an article on Le Monde (in French) saying that FF now accounts for 14% of internet traffic in Europe overall, with anything from 7% (Lithuania) to 30% (Finland) in individual countries. It seems kind of amazing to me that in Germany it has achieved 24%. Is this the fastest new product acceptance in history? (Chime in if you can think of a faster/bigger one).
The trouble with so much success is that people are going to come out the woodwork claiming trademark issues. And I can only wonder what will happen when it reaches 50%...
Someone will probably try to create a meter-wide brain now, and then enslave it to produce slightly better marketing memes. That is, until it escapes from its jar and takes over the world.
Some of the zealots may simply be developers who understand that their livelihood could come to an end unless enough others follow this move along with them. If too many leave, the Mac will suffer in comparisons against Windhose.
They must feel very vulnerable because of this switch, so, to compensate for their vulnerability, they are being that much more rigid and controling of any hint of disapproval.
Either that, or the zealotry is actually the work of those paid bloggers we've been hearing about. That is, MS also stands to gain if people believe that their opponents are zealots, commies, hippies and lunatics.
This idea of flying printers got me to thinking about the waste
disposal issues of so many useless parts accumulating.
In general, what to do with a printer with cartridges that cost almost
the same price as the printer, are shipped less than half full, that
dry out if you let them sit for a few days (something the tech support
doesn't give you any clue how to fix) leave streaks and never quite
match the color tone of the image and which resist all attempts at
using third party ink? Hmm.
Maybe with some mods it could be used:
As a camera mount? Let the camera swing left and right to get a better view out the window?
To iron clothes? Just feed the pants leg in and let the printer do the rest. Maybe in combination
with a TCPA-encumbered processor to provide the heat?
As a blinkenlights port? Use the LEDs on the printer to keep the beat of your fav3 tun3z.
To make sound effects? Have it make shuffling and grating noises to ward off burglars thinking of entering your home.
Put a knife on it and maybe it will peel potatoes? "It slices, it dices!"
"Believe me, I'm not trying to make the case for oil here!"
Reading your other posts, I realize that. It is worth knowing and understanding what other people may misinterpret as the truth because it allows the counterargument to be made.
As far as the 30/1 figure, I can only believe it could be cited as the transportation of the crude oil to the refinery, on a relatively efficient supertanker, and then possibly the refining, since the temperatures never reach much beyond 400 degrees C, according to this article. Beyond that, a figure of 3.33% sounds too good to be true. That couldn't represent the full cycle cost of transportation and all of its indirect and implied costs.
For the sake of beating the dead horse, did I mention the cost of engine overhauls for the fuel delivery trucks, and the fact that they have to make the trip back empty? Insurance, accidents, spills and inspections? There's a lot that probably went unaccounted in that paper.
"The length in the atmosphere is almost insignificant compared to the total length."
True, but the bottom is also where gravity is pulling at its strongest. Any savings of weight in that section goes a long way to reducing the size of the rest of the cable. Conversely, adding extra mass near the top adds almost no weight because the mass is in microgravity.
In theory, yes, maypoles are going to be less strength redundant, but they can be more spatially redundant. That is, a meteor shower is less likely to take out the whole thing if it is spread out over several kilometers and if the meteors are closely bunched together. Also, consider that repairing or replacing one of several cables is less tricky than repairing the only cable that is holding everything up.
Perhaps maypoles and mountaintop stations will be too fancy for the first elevator, but in preparation for major meteor showers I think they will want to consider those options.
"oil's EROEI is about 30/1, which is just phenomenally good"
Where did you get this figure?
Does it include the losses from refining the oil?
Does it include the up to 20% loss from transporting the energy to the places where it will be used?
Does it include the periodic need to drive the vehicles to service stations, an otherwise wasted trip?
Indirect costs? Extra road maintenance? Extra costs of idle engines in bumper-to-bumper traffic (if not electric)? (etc.)
Getting the oil out of the ground is only part of the energy needed to use it. I think if all of the costs were added up, the 30/1 figure wouldn't apply.
And, naturally, after using the oil, the costs of cleaning up the air, water and keeping the land farmable are not taken into account, but one study placed a figure of $400 billion on that, IIRC, if I didn't underestimate it. That doesn't include the health costs, either...
...And if anyone is still worried about lightning, it would be possible to attach the bottom of the cable to a airship which floats above the weather and can control its own ballast and therefore altitude. This would require periodic relief flights from 2 or 3 other airships based nearby, but the technology is off the shelf at this point. If all of the airships are damaged, at the worst case the anchor weights it is holding up sink to some stable equilibrium at ground level.
Not having a base station on the ground also solves problems such as tsunami, atmospheric aircraft (they can't fly that high), and it makes the cable that much harder to find in the first place. The only major catch (that I can think of) is that it requires the base to be near the equator.
"You confuse maypole and hoytether. A maypole is a radial structure where the cables merge at a single point and diverge thereafter..."
I accept your definition, albeit without clarifying the dimensions of each.
As I understand it, a hoytether is a millimeter-scale (micro) structure whereas maypoles are meter or potentially kilometer-sized (macro) structures. What I was intending to propose near the middle section was a two-cable maypole of hoytether-based cables, NOT maypoles instead of hoytethers. Now, if a reverse, hierarchical maypole can be used near the top to provide a tapering effect, that doesn't preclude one from using hoytethers for each of the cables. The weight distribution or energy release characteristics may well be better for such a scheme.
One thing that I also left out is that, for the middle section, I was thinking, not in terms of a single maypole with two cables hanging down, but one where the cables meet back up again to form a reverse maypole at the bottom, similar to how train tracks accomplish the same feat. (Let the analogies of this to the transcontinental railroad begin...)
Further, I am not proposing maypoles as a solution to aircraft impacts (although indeed a million little cables hanging down would be difficult to knock out, wouldn't they?). Primarily, I see them as a way of making it possible to affix an SE to a mountaintop while still allowing the structure to dodge orbiting objects with predictable orbits.
"You just have to be careful how you interpret the results"
That's the fly in the ointment. The vast majority of people are easy marks for rigged benchmarks (and marketing types know it all too well).
For instance, a tiny detail like the Mac memory timing is CAS3 whereas the Xeon memory is CAS2.5 slips right by most casual observers and can make fair bit of difference. If that's the way the Macs are always shipped, that's one thing, but if the people doing the benchmark deliberately chose that configuration on purpose to make the Mac look bad then that's quite another.
That's why I prefer having a control for experiments. It makes those sorts of details harder to slip by. If my computer is slow, I want to know why so I can make informed purchases, upgrades or changes.
I agree that most people will just want to know the emotionally charged and page-hit generating "if the Mac is faster," but things change so quickly that the value of the simplistic finding will be of use for a very short time (and override more important user concerns). By the time the public perception accepts a fact, it will no longer be true... So, it is better for people to conclude that benchmarks with simple answers are too prone to be a front for marketing, and that there is no substitute for being informed about what one is getting.
As long as you're maypoling near the bottom (which introduces a railroad switch like complexity to runners traveling up/down the elevator), you may as well maypole near the middle where satellites are most likely to hit the elevator, so that the platform on the ground (sea or mountaintop) doesn't have to be moving around. You simply rotate, say, two cables 10 kilometers apart, 90 degrees as needed to avoid collisions, death rays and the like.
At that point, maypoling should be used at the top too, in reverse, so that there only needs to be a standard width for the cables, making them cheaper to manufacture over a highly tapered single cable. If the same machinery used to build suspension bridges and other things can be used for the space elevator, the sales volume will make it even cheaper.
Having to negotiate intersections introduces an extra complexity, slows down the speed of travel and adds extra weight, but it may become a desirable complexity at some point if it allows simultaneous up/down travel (i.e. more capacity), can be extended to make travel easy between elevators, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Think quality. Think choice.
Suppose that instead of someone else growing steak in a lab for you, and you having to guess whether this mystery meat was truly lab grown or not, that instead you are able to buy a tiny quantity of seed culture for 100 different things (e.g. the 100 finest varieties of steak, or the 100 finest kinds of gourmet coffee beans, the tastiest spice plant leaves, etc...) and suppose you can choose to grow these things yourself in your own grower, process them yourself, etc.
Suddenly, it may be possible to eat much better food than before, and you choose to eat only what you like. Stuff that you would not have been able to afford before you can suddenly have every day. Further, you wouldn't have to drive a car to 50 places to get all of your food.
Now, suppose (since we are already supposing) that a food grower were to go down in price and become affordable. Then, if oil prices keep going up, growing your own food eventually becomes cheaper than transporting it from somewhere else.
You're not trying to imply that you live downwind are you?
Ob ontopic: Um, I don't think this specific use of Google maps has been patented yet.
Ask yourself: do you benefit from software patents?
I know I don't, especially in light of the quality of the latest "innovations" that are really just a reworded version of the same junk. Software patents have only been a hindrance to me. They're only a bane and a bother to 99.9999% of the population. Why should almost everyone's time be wasted with increasingly ridiculous nonsense that benefits almost no one, stifles technology use and acceptance and doesn't really succeed in identifying and rewarding all of the innovators? Even the officially sanctioned innovators don't receive that much in return once all of the lawyers and filings and other administrative overhead eat up the profits. So, it benefits only a few people and the rest of us bear the costs in the form of wastes of time, service interruptions, higher product and service costs, responding to legal claims, etc.
Does an art museum interrupt and charge a painter for each brushstroke that resembles someone else's painting? It's not worth their time. Similarly, software patents are not worth our time at the level they want to enforce them. Instead it just costs us an environment in which to innovate freely.
This smells like a troll, but I'll bite, because you have come up with a criticism that may be valid.
Keep in mind, first of all, that a lack of a moral compass and militancy are two different things. A militant technologist usually is trying to get you to buy something or remember a brand name, whereas an morally-neutral futurist may have no such goal, other than simply wanting to explore what the future may bring so as to begin to determine what may be good or bad.
It isn't always possible, except through hindsight, to determine what will turn out to be good or bad in the long run. What is bad today may be good tomorrow, in terms of technology, or vice-versa. So, morally speaking, it is somewhat democratic to share dreams and aspirations with the public, so that fewer people can be surprised by it when it arrives, and a moral consensus can build more quickly when it is necessary.
If you would rather that people remain ignorant about future possibilities, then I would argue that you are more militant than he is.
Given the blindspot for Tragedies of the Commons, I suppose we should count ourselves lucky that bringing that much in moon materials here would be outrageously expensive. It would be even harder to breathe with the extra gravity...
But, in response to the GP, it isn't a given that moving stuff off the moon would cause the moon's orbit to change; it depends what the destination is -- it doesn't have to be Earth. You could mine it and use it for something without bringing it here.
If the mass is to be used for a power station placed in lunar orbit, for example, there would likely be no net change. Also, if we had the requisite magical powers, we could split the moon in half and place the halves in opposing orbits, or have four moons, or crumble it down into a continuous ring. There would be no benefit to doing so, but the point is that an orbital balance can be achieved even with large masses. (Not that there wouldn't be other side effects. Replacing the moon with a continuous ring would get rid of tides, which coastal wildlife needs for its survival (particularly coral reef habitats)).
If the worry is about foam banging into the shuttle, then a concentric system of interconnected collapsible steel wire fences could help. Not that it will keep foam from hitting the shuttle, it could be travelling way too fast -- the idea is to slow it down and reduce the spin rate so the worst of the damage is avoided.
(Then again, why bother adding more systems to the shuttle at all, since it is going to be replaced by something that will be placed at the top of a rocket -- out of reach of projectiles. The idea of launching cargo on cheap if risky launch platforms and people separately on safety-optimized vehicles is a far saner approach.)
(I'm finding it so hard to abstain from commenting on the wisdom of replacing marvelously stable and transparent file systems with databases... I guess I'll try this time.)
As database operations become more commonplace, even the average user will "benefit" from this. I place it in quotes because it was a problem that didn't need solving prior to the "use databases to manage your buddy list" mentality.
There are probably other, saner uses for it though, although people will have to weigh this benefit against the cost of creating another dependency on their system for a specific library tied to specific hardware, and the concerns of what happens when some of the parts are upgraded but not the others....
"at 20 mpg even with gasoline engines, it isn't hurting the environmnet nearly as much as cars"
Only in the sense that, say, in a place like Alaska or Brazil, you might be able to avoid building roads in the first place by using only this kind of vehicle there. It wouldn't be able to carry heavy loads though, so getting cargo in and out of those places would still be expensive.
For emissions, consider that the mileage figures given are probably the very ideal case. They might not include takeoff and landing, for instance, or they may be reflecting what the longest possible trip after takeoff would use. For short commutes, I'll bet the mileage figures will be as bad as an SUV, especially in a VTOL flight.
Then, ask yourself what speed the Skycar drivers will actually cruise at. Will everyone obediently drive at the ideal efficient cruising speed, just like everyone drives at 55 mph today, or will everyone want to floor it and go at 350+ top speed?
I think the future is going to demand more inventiveness than what I see there. A Skycar is efficient transportation? A Hydrogen powered Hummer is efficient transportation?
Some of these things may sound fun, but unless some basic thinking starts to change I think what we're actually going to need is a farm that picks up and moves as climate change happens, artificial noses to breathe oxygen depleted air and so forth.
to share articles over a P2P protocol. Right now it is just an app that stores content offline. With proper checksumming, it could change the way the content is delivered and reduce Wikipedia's bandwidth bill significantly.
Is it harder than going to disk to load pages from a hugely bloated object-handling library? Even if it isn't bloated today, it will be, because you do not have control over the source.
Objects are fine for complex graphical junk. For parsing process statistics and such object instances and their attendant memory handling overhead are overkill.
There was no mention of TPM in the summary. Only a line about an i945G driver.
However, sourceforge lists a new TPM device driver at http://sourceforge.net/projects/tpmdd. It is a set of patches which add TPM support to pre-2.6.12 kernels.
Also, a TPM-tools package using the trousers library is at http://sourceforge.net/projects/trousers .
An article in heise (translated link) titled "Linux kernel 2,6,12 with TPM support."
It seems like every single planet they have discovered they have branded as earthlike. So now when they do find something earthlike (with oceans of water and not boiling sulfuric acid or something), it will be ignored by people as so much wolf-calling.
Other planets were gas giants, but they were called "Earthlike." This one sounds like it is close enough to its star that the surface could melt lead. Not exactly a good place to set up a tent.
"Earthlike planet" seems to simply mean "planet" the way they use it. Had they discovered a floating ice cube beyond Pluto, they would have called that "the next planet." If there is a speck flying around nearby, they call it a killer asteroid, and if a killer asteroid passes by without crashing they say "whew, that was close, we didn't see that until it passed by."
Reminds me of:
Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she laid an asteroid. --Mark Twain
While IE certainly proliferated quickly, in most cases that wasn't because of an explicit decision by each consumer to download it as some new thing that hadn't been there before and then take the trouble to install it and learn how to use it.
Most people got IE already installed with their operating system, and they got that with the computer they purchased. Their ISP software may have included it in a bundle in some cases. Just having IE should not be interpreted as a statement of preference.
The name "explorer" is found in a lot of other products, but we see no trademark issues for some reason... Maybe FF should be called "Internet Firefox," that is, unless someone owns a trademark for "Internet," or for the space between words. :)
Just saw an article on Le Monde (in French) saying that FF now accounts for 14% of internet traffic in Europe overall, with anything from 7% (Lithuania) to 30% (Finland) in individual countries. It seems kind of amazing to me that in Germany it has achieved 24%. Is this the fastest new product acceptance in history? (Chime in if you can think of a faster /bigger one).
The trouble with so much success is that people are going to come out the woodwork claiming trademark issues. And I can only wonder what will happen when it reaches 50%...
Someone will probably try to create a meter-wide brain now, and then enslave it to produce slightly better marketing memes. That is, until it escapes from its jar and takes over the world.
Some of the zealots may simply be developers who understand that their livelihood could come to an end unless enough others follow this move along with them. If too many leave, the Mac will suffer in comparisons against Windhose.
They must feel very vulnerable because of this switch, so, to compensate for their vulnerability, they are being that much more rigid and controling of any hint of disapproval.
Either that, or the zealotry is actually the work of those paid bloggers we've been hearing about. That is, MS also stands to gain if people believe that their opponents are zealots, commies, hippies and lunatics.
This idea of flying printers got me to thinking about the waste disposal issues of so many useless parts accumulating.
In general, what to do with a printer with cartridges that cost almost the same price as the printer, are shipped less than half full, that dry out if you let them sit for a few days (something the tech support doesn't give you any clue how to fix) leave streaks and never quite match the color tone of the image and which resist all attempts at using third party ink? Hmm.
Maybe with some mods it could be used:
Just a few to get you started.
Reading your other posts, I realize that. It is worth knowing and understanding what other people may misinterpret as the truth because it allows the counterargument to be made.
As far as the 30/1 figure, I can only believe it could be cited as the transportation of the crude oil to the refinery, on a relatively efficient supertanker, and then possibly the refining, since the temperatures never reach much beyond 400 degrees C, according to this article. Beyond that, a figure of 3.33% sounds too good to be true. That couldn't represent the full cycle cost of transportation and all of its indirect and implied costs.
For the sake of beating the dead horse, did I mention the cost of engine overhauls for the fuel delivery trucks, and the fact that they have to make the trip back empty? Insurance, accidents, spills and inspections? There's a lot that probably went unaccounted in that paper.
"The length in the atmosphere is almost insignificant compared to the total length."
True, but the bottom is also where gravity is pulling at its strongest. Any savings of weight in that section goes a long way to reducing the size of the rest of the cable. Conversely, adding extra mass near the top adds almost no weight because the mass is in microgravity.
In theory, yes, maypoles are going to be less strength redundant, but they can be more spatially redundant. That is, a meteor shower is less likely to take out the whole thing if it is spread out over several kilometers and if the meteors are closely bunched together. Also, consider that repairing or replacing one of several cables is less tricky than repairing the only cable that is holding everything up.
Perhaps maypoles and mountaintop stations will be too fancy for the first elevator, but in preparation for major meteor showers I think they will want to consider those options.
Where did you get this figure?
- Does it include the losses from refining the oil?
-
Does it include the up to 20% loss from transporting the energy to the places where it will be used?
-
Does it include the periodic need to drive the vehicles to service stations, an otherwise wasted trip?
-
Indirect costs? Extra road maintenance? Extra costs of idle engines in bumper-to-bumper traffic (if not electric)? (etc.)
Getting the oil out of the ground is only part of the energy needed to use it. I think if all of the costs were added up, the 30/1 figure wouldn't apply.And, naturally, after using the oil, the costs of cleaning up the air, water and keeping the land farmable are not taken into account, but one study placed a figure of $400 billion on that, IIRC, if I didn't underestimate it. That doesn't include the health costs, either...
...And if anyone is still worried about lightning, it would be possible to attach the bottom of the cable to a airship which floats above the weather and can control its own ballast and therefore altitude. This would require periodic relief flights from 2 or 3 other airships based nearby, but the technology is off the shelf at this point. If all of the airships are damaged, at the worst case the anchor weights it is holding up sink to some stable equilibrium at ground level.
Not having a base station on the ground also solves problems such as tsunami, atmospheric aircraft (they can't fly that high), and it makes the cable that much harder to find in the first place. The only major catch (that I can think of) is that it requires the base to be near the equator.
I accept your definition, albeit without clarifying the dimensions of each.
As I understand it, a hoytether is a millimeter-scale (micro) structure whereas maypoles are meter or potentially kilometer-sized (macro) structures. What I was intending to propose near the middle section was a two-cable maypole of hoytether-based cables, NOT maypoles instead of hoytethers. Now, if a reverse, hierarchical maypole can be used near the top to provide a tapering effect, that doesn't preclude one from using hoytethers for each of the cables. The weight distribution or energy release characteristics may well be better for such a scheme.
One thing that I also left out is that, for the middle section, I was thinking, not in terms of a single maypole with two cables hanging down, but one where the cables meet back up again to form a reverse maypole at the bottom, similar to how train tracks accomplish the same feat. (Let the analogies of this to the transcontinental railroad begin...)
Further, I am not proposing maypoles as a solution to aircraft impacts (although indeed a million little cables hanging down would be difficult to knock out, wouldn't they?). Primarily, I see them as a way of making it possible to affix an SE to a mountaintop while still allowing the structure to dodge orbiting objects with predictable orbits.
That's the fly in the ointment. The vast majority of people are easy marks for rigged benchmarks (and marketing types know it all too well).
For instance, a tiny detail like the Mac memory timing is CAS3 whereas the Xeon memory is CAS2.5 slips right by most casual observers and can make fair bit of difference. If that's the way the Macs are always shipped, that's one thing, but if the people doing the benchmark deliberately chose that configuration on purpose to make the Mac look bad then that's quite another.
That's why I prefer having a control for experiments. It makes those sorts of details harder to slip by. If my computer is slow, I want to know why so I can make informed purchases, upgrades or changes.
I agree that most people will just want to know the emotionally charged and page-hit generating "if the Mac is faster," but things change so quickly that the value of the simplistic finding will be of use for a very short time (and override more important user concerns). By the time the public perception accepts a fact, it will no longer be true... So, it is better for people to conclude that benchmarks with simple answers are too prone to be a front for marketing, and that there is no substitute for being informed about what one is getting.
As long as you're maypoling near the bottom (which introduces a railroad switch like complexity to runners traveling up/down the elevator), you may as well maypole near the middle where satellites are most likely to hit the elevator, so that the platform on the ground (sea or mountaintop) doesn't have to be moving around. You simply rotate, say, two cables 10 kilometers apart, 90 degrees as needed to avoid collisions, death rays and the like.
At that point, maypoling should be used at the top too, in reverse, so that there only needs to be a standard width for the cables, making them cheaper to manufacture over a highly tapered single cable. If the same machinery used to build suspension bridges and other things can be used for the space elevator, the sales volume will make it even cheaper.
Having to negotiate intersections introduces an extra complexity, slows down the speed of travel and adds extra weight, but it may become a desirable complexity at some point if it allows simultaneous up/down travel (i.e. more capacity), can be extended to make travel easy between elevators, etc.