Kevin's Watch

SerScot wrote: Carbon nano-tubes.

Nope. They're amazing, and we haven't begun to find the uses for them [and a host of carbon+various other things that are relatively cheap and easy to manipulate on that level]...but they are not strong enough, not even close.

Back a few weeks I looked up the Boron/carbon thing...it's way stronger and still not even CLOSE to strong enough...by which I mean can't, or BARELY can take the strain of a weight on the orbital end massive enough to hold itself up. Add anything at all anywhere as a load, it is catastrophic failure.

So Clarke's ghost rears its ugly head, huh?

Arthur C Clarke was a huge fan of the space elevator idea... and though I never read Fountains of Paradise which focuses primarily on them, in 3001 (and maybe the one before) he theorized that the material that would be strong enough to construct these elevators would be a metal alloy that had been under immense pressure at Jupiter's core for billions of years.

So, never mind if we have material strong enough, how are we going to actually BUILD the thing? At some point, early on, the elevator would have to be functional in order to carry resources to build onto it. And towards the end, when we have 8+ days just to carry pieces and workers up to where they want to place it...

Orlion wrote:So Clarke's ghost rears its ugly head, huh?

Arthur C Clarke was a huge fan of the space elevator idea... and though I never read Fountains of Paradise which focuses primarily on them, in 3001 (and maybe the one before) he theorized that the material that would be strong enough to construct these elevators would be a metal alloy that had been under immense pressure at Jupiter's core for billions of years.

So, never mind if we have material strong enough, how are we going to actually BUILD the thing? At some point, early on, the elevator would have to be functional in order to carry resources to build onto it. And towards the end, when we have 8+ days just to carry pieces and workers up to where they want to place it...

Heh, I'm not familiar with that particular Clarke...but there was a book by someone that used "trans-uranics" ...basically very rare, cuz only formed from truly giant supernova...higher up the table than the radioactives, super-heavy/dense/strong and stable [non-fissionable/decaying/radioactive].

I think I said earlier, even given suitable materials, we'd have to build it from the top down, which would require bare minimum of 20,000 heavy rocket launches.