[ExI] 10 mega construction projects that could save the environment and the economy

[Stefano Vaj]

On 3 December 2011 17:54, Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com> wrote:

> At least we know that single walled nanotubes won't do it.  At at
> tension short of what is needed, they become unstable with 6 member
> rings becoming 5 and 7 member rings and the nanotube parts like a
> stocking with a run in it.  Sorry.
>

Many of us think of space elevators as simply an engineering project, but I
wonder whether this may simply be impossible to achieve in too-deep gravity
wells.

This reminds me of a SF short story starring a very advanced race living on
a Jovian planet, with a gravity high enough to prevent chemical rockets to
reach outer space, and nuclear propulsion not being an option owing to the
scarcity of heavy, fissile elements in the planet  outer crust...

Perhaps we are already lucky that in our case chemical and nuclear rockets
might well in principle "bootstrap" us out of a terrestrian insulation...

-- 
Stefano Vaj
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