OT: Hare-Brained Idea of the Century

Boy, hare brained is right! Let's see, winds of several hundred MPH on all those windows, what the hell are they going to make 31000 miles of cables out of, and will all that wind friction alter the orbit of the asteroid? (Ummm, where are they going to GET this asteroid from, anyway?) Then, it will all come crashing down somewhere.

Oh, yeah, will the cities it flies over mind having a solar eclipse every day?

Love to see the business plan on how to build it. Dubai has expertise in building tall buildings? Can they extrapolate that to 1000 miles of height? Oh, right!

Jon

I'd be willing to bet everything I own in exchange for $20 on the wager that will never happen in my lifetime.

But the Elon Musk neural lace is a close competitor.

We can always hope it crashes down on New Yaaawk City >:-}

Or San Fransicko ;-)

...Jim Thompson

The cables are always made from "Near-Future Nanomaterials"

And kill tens of thousands of people. You'd enjoy that.

This story came out 3 days early.

Feeling better I see ;)

Cheers

Ah. A surprisingly /factual/ story from the Daily Wail.

Nothing derived from the old "space elevator" concepts, oh no.

Yep. I can walk the length of the house before needing to stop and rest :-( ...Jim Thompson

-- | James E.Thompson | mens | | Analog Innovations | et | | Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus | | STV, Queen Creek, AZ 85142 Skype: skypeanalog | | | Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat | | E-mail Icon at

Thinking outside the box... producing elegant solutions.

So it'll fail to consistently stick to it's orbit. And the low end is below mountain peaks. There's a nice combination.

It would also be a military nightmare. 1st world countries would not permit it over their airspace.

Oh, and yes it will harvest fog & rain, but not enough for everyone's needs. We all know there's only one way out of that... cue a PR disaster.

Possible, no, but even when it is it would be wildly expensive living space.

NT

It's actually a minor variation on a hare-brained scheme from last century.

It got into science fiction eventually with Arthur C. Clarke's novel, The Fountains of Paradise, and Charles Sheffield's first novel, The Web Between the Worlds, both published in 1979, which is when I first recall running into it.

It showed in the Ariadne column in New Scientist on December 24, 1964, and I should have read it there, but that was long before I had a subscription to New Scientist, though I did get to read most issues.

Trust Jim Thompson and the Daily Mail not to know the history.

The Daily Wail doesn't care about history. All it cares about is stories that sell the paper.

A classic example is wailing about the presence of some chemical or other in food, wailing "why do They still allow it" - and carefully neglecting that the EU had banned it 6 years earlier!

An April 1st press release seems to have come out a few days early. Daily Wail editors are not very bright.

Arthur C Clarke suggested something similar a long time ago.

The bottom floor would have to move at over 16000km do one orbit. That is quote a drag.

It's an early April Fool's Day story, not to be taken seriously.

That's true for a significant majority of Daily Wail articles!

The best thing about the website is the quality of its photos, e.g.

Yeah we've been pointing at it and laughing at it over in rec.arts.sf.science for a few days now.

So many things wrong with it, so little time.

Glad to see you made it back alive. Please stop issuing "I might die in surgery" warnings. My own mortality is worrying enough.

Mark L. Fergerson

There are more amusing versions, e.g. the LEO elevator--you put a super-cable in LEO and spin it end for end, synchronized with the Earth's rotation, so that one end comes nearly vertically down through the atmosphere and then nearly vertically up again.

That makes fewer demands on the cable than the elevator to geosync, even the version without the asteroid.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs