Saturday, 13 September 2003

They've stopped laughing

It looks like scientists have stopped laughing at Clark's idea in Fountains of Paradise of building a space elevator. I think that most people loved this idea. Imagine, being able to go to space for about 100 $ / pound.

Currently, the cost of just putting something, anything, including fuel into orbit makes things really expensive. Too expensive for most things other than telecommunication or governments.

I think that this idea has caught the imagination of many other people, including Kim Robinson which had "Clarke elevators" in his (her?) Mars series (red, green, blue). One thing that was done durring a takeover / civial upheaval on Mars was they shot the elevator out of the sky... it's not like it can really dodge or anything. Well, when that thing would come done, it would wrap around the world several times, and lay destruction to anything in it's path. Not cool. That is definally something that would have to be seriously looked at when building something like that.

Some frontiers are still frontiers because of how inaccessable they are. This might just be the door opening that we need to be able to go beyond this rock.
Listening to: The Tragically Hip - Ahead By A Century


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