I'm sorry that more urgent issues have been keeping me from
posting regularly but on the bright side I have 145 pages done of a
second textbook that will hopefully make my plumage more interesting
to potential employers.
I want to give credit to whoever it was thought to book Brian
Turner, the guest from a week or two ago working on the Space Elevator
concept. That's the sort of creative and imaginative guest booking
that marked, well, the early years when they couldn't get real guests
or the strike shows when, well, they couldn't get real guests.
But the Space Elevator is a fasinating concept, and one of the
handful of space-enthusiast ideas to not be completely nuts. Bringing
someone on to talk about it made for an interesting segment and even a
bit of public service, as the communicating of novel science and
technology ideas to the public is.
I do like the Space Elevator, although I'm not unquestioningly
in love with it: while it's true that building such an elevator would
allow a great lowering in prices for launching things into space, it's
not clear that it does better than rockets would if the sort of money
Space Elevators require for development were invested in improving the
operational characteristics of rockets. (There's not enough work done
in improving the behavior and handling of rockets.)
Conan had a lot of fun with the idea of this long rope,
essentially, but it's worth pointing out the basic idea of a really
long tether that reaches to geosynchronous orbit isn't by itself
ridiculous. Humanity has been building cables thousands of miles
long since the 1850s, and building one that goes out to 20,000
miles is ... longer than has been done, but not so much longer that
*that's* the problem.
The real problem is making a cable lightweight and strong
enough for the task. While a couple materials with the right weight
and strength characteristics exist, there aren't yet ways known to
make cables of those materials *nearly* long enough.
It would've helped the segment had Turner remembered to show
the Earth-and-string demonstration right away, though.
(Mystery Science Theater 3000 introduced the idea in its sixth
season as the Umbilicus/Umbilicon/Umbili****t/et cetera, although may
have thought they were just being silly. There was also an episode
where Mike climbs down an enormously long rope ladder, although he ends
up in Castle Forrester in the middle of breakfast and scurries back up.)
--
Joseph Nebus
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