Space elevators
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How very Star Trek...
A space elevator could make it much cheaper and faster to get goods to other planets, like Mars.
The Obayashi Corporation based in Japan announced in 2012 plans to begin building one by next year.
Not only would it cost $100 billion, there are huge technological and organizational challenges.
Imagine a long tether linking Earth to space that could launch us to orbit at a fraction of the cost and slingshot us to other worlds at record speed.
That's the basic idea behind a space elevator.
Instead of taking six to eight months to reach Mars, scientists have estimated a space elevator could get us there in three to four months or even as quickly as 40 days.
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I predict it will go over budget.
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Arthur C. Clarke wrote about space elevators in at least two books. In the sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey, [Spoiler alert for a decades-old book, so avert your eyes if it matters, and also I may be misremembering a little or even conflating some of this with the third book in the series], huge obelisks reproduce at a geometric pace on Jupiter until it has enough mass to support fusion and becomes a small star. In the process, it catapults huge amounts of diamonds (and I'm sure other stuff) into space around it. The value of diamond jewelry presumably went to nothing unless the De Beers people's marketing machine found a way to keep their Earth diamonds artificially valued, but the result was a tremendous amount of strong, light, cheap raw material that transformed Earth's economy into something currently unfathomable. One of the results is that we used those raw materials to build a space elevator that, in turn, brought our economy to a new level. The hope is always that such things will end the very idea of poverty, but I do not think that this is the way that human beings operate. Anyway.
One of his less-known books, The Fountains of Paradise, centered on the construction of a space elevator. Since it needs to be built on land underneath a geosynchronous orbit and there are some constraints that make the number of locations that meet requirements and are not under an ocean very small, and since Sri Lanka is one of those places and he lived there for much of his life, I think this was a very personal book for him. The protagonist is an engineer as devoted and personally associated with a monumental work thought to be impossible as Eiffel and the Roeblings. I read it many years ago, but it made an impression on me. As a result, I would love to live to see us build a space elevator, but I've never thought it possible.
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Mary Anna,thanks for that recollection and 'remembrance of Aurthur C. Clarke's vision of a space elevator. It's a concept that has reemerged ocassionally. I truly hope that this vision becomes reality. It truly is potentially revolutionary.
Big Al
