[extropy-chat] Space elevator numbers III

[Eugen Leitl]

On Thu, Feb 15, 2007 at 08:12:10PM -0500, Keith Henson wrote:

> Just *starting* on this project might be enough to damp most of the drift 
> toward wars.

I am sorry, but there is absolutely no reason to believe that.
It just looks like a way to put all your golden eggs in one
large, very precarious basket. If you're worried about energy, there
are some very simple things you could do, most of them even not
requiring a lot of cash right away.

Mandate a law which implements a price ratchet on oil, via taxes.
All the proceeds from the taxes must go directly into renewables.
Mandate taxes on long-distance transports which don't come from
CO2-neutral sources. Mandate that all new vehicles must be able 
to handle M90 (10% methanol, 90% gasoline), and all new gas stations
and car materials can handle straight methanol, giving a decade
or two time for retrofitting existing infrastructure. Mandate 
a carbon emission cap/1 km for new vehicles. Mandate new buildings 
to be insulated, and include passive thermal solar and/or heat 
pumps or geothermal and/or PV and/or wind turbines (vertical or horizontal) as
integral part of the building. Use funds from the tax price ratchet.
Use funds for R&D into methanol via direct methane oxidation and
direct methanol fuel cells and hydrogen reformers. 

That's off the top of my head, but you already see where I'm aiming
at. 
 
> Putting the anchor point at Baker Island deals with most of the 
> possibilities of being attacked.  Putting the anchor point on the 

Anything involving launching a ton of ballbearings on the other
side of the Earth with orbit intersecting your ribbon will kill it.
A single perforation will cause a catastrophic failure, there is
simply no way to put a safety measure because you're at the limit
of the tensile strength. Theoretical tensile strength. The real
stuff we have now doesn't even come within the touching distance.

What about atomic oxygen attacking the ribbon? You'll need to coat
it. What about wear from the climbers? You will need to constantly
reinforce the ribbon.

> Enterprise is going to inhibit a considerable number of the 
> others.  Getting the major countries to invest in it would not hurt either.

Getting someone to invest in one giant single point of failure,
controlled by whomever is controlling the anchor point, or who
can launch a ton of ball bearings on a collision course... sign 
me up, I guess.
 
> The *big* problem is the cable failing and there the most likely reason is 
> for it to be cut by missed space junk.  If the big pieces are cleaned up, 
> and you need them for counterweight mass anyway, then it is rather unlikely 
> you are going to cut all strands at once.  Brakes and grabbers on the 
> pulley stations plus dumping the loads might prevent a complete 
> failure.  Keeping enough cable at GEO to restore the elevator would be a 
> good backup.  Cloning the elevator to other locations is also a darn good idea.
> 
> If anyone has any ideas on how to make this more robust, please speak 
> up.  I am not the last reluctant to give credit.  Keith Lofstrom 
> contributed the idea of the transfer station at 50 miles.

I would be very interested to see in suggestions, because I can't think
of none that can be trivially circumvented. The guy with a kg of C4
is really not your problem.
 
> >Wouldn't this be very much a case of putting some very expensive eggs in
> >a very exposed basket?
> 
> This isn't a choice really.  The only other long term, non-carbon, large 
> scale (centralized) energy solution is nuclear reactors and I recently went 

I hope we'll never see the nuclear lobby latch upon nuclear (not
even thorium, because that would mean too much novelty for
enrichened uranium/MOX folks) and the agrilobby upon bioethanol.

> into detail about the problems *that* can cause.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820            http://www.ativel.com
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