Space Towers
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 29 ก.ย. 2024
- One day we may retire our rockets and instead reach the heavens by ascending towers so tall they dwarf mountains, and rise above the sky itself.
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Credits:
Space Towers
Science & Futurism with Isaac Arthur
Episode 398, June 8, 2023
Written, Produced & Narrated by Isaac Arthur
Editors:
Briana Brownell
Ken York (YD Visual)
David McFarlane
Graphics by:
Jarred Eagley
Jeremy Jozwik
Katie Byrne
Ken York (YD Visual)
Phil Swan
Sergio Botero
Steve Bowers
Udo Schroeter
Music Courtesy of:
Epidemic Sound epidemicsound.c...
Markus Junnikkala, "Plotting a Course", "We Roam the Stars"
Stellardrone, "Red Giant", "Between the Rings"
Miguel Johsnon, "Far From Home", "So Many Stars"
Aerium, "Fifth Star of Aldebaran"
Great episode. There's a Sci Fi Manga called "Battle Angel Alita" that discusses conflict on a post apocalyptic surface, a space elevator archopolis, space stations, compartmentalized terraformed bubble habitats on Mars, and the environments as well as specialized lifeforms for surviving those. The second major story arch focuses on the space elevator archopolis. A very interesting subject indeed.
interesting, gotta read that!
How faithful is the live action film in your opinion?
@@lljkgktudjlrsmygilug decent. The overall sequence of events lines up. Some of the characters are changed like the lady Dr. I don't remember a street ball sequence with neighborhood kids. Overall, a great adaptation. 9 out of 10, would recommend.
@@outandabout259 There is a book with the results of a study sponsored by NASA about space elevators. You can learn the physics, equations, pros/cons and cost estimates for such a structure. If you are more sci-fi prone, read Clark's Fountains of Paradise, a very good novel
There are interesting notions in Anime or Manga who explore settings like that too.
Ergo Proxy does bubbles.
Gundamn 00 does Space Elevator scenes. And weirder Space scenes.
BLAME! does a bunch Superstructure stuff. The world is essentially a rampant Dyson Sphere. Or the like.
The same guy does Knights of Sidonia, which goes truly truly Transhuman. Emphasis on Trans. Less emphasis on human.
There’s a ton of stuff out there to give an image.
At 23:30, I do want to push back against one thing. I have a hard time imagining that languages could diverge in the Sun Dial, especially if it starts homogenous. Languages diverge in isolation and converge in communication. The whole existance of a tower like this is predicated on a certain amount of free travel along its height, otherwise the interconnected systems should collapse at some point, rendering it mostly uninhabitable. Additionally, such a structure requires constant power, and probably constant intercommunication, they are all on same internet, which should also slow divergence. Third, it is a manufactured thing, with maintenance requirements, and the original language will thus remain a force for all who learn the systems discouraging linguistic drift. The Tower's language may shift over time, but I would need to see a very good case that the floors could become isolated from each other enough for linguistic divergence, while still being interconnected enough to allow the tower to exist and function.
I offer the example of English. Several countries in constant contact speak this language and have for two centuries at least now. Yet there are differences in that common language in how it is spoken, word usage, and such. Even with in those countries dialects have began to sprout up.
@@davidtherwhanger6795 The difference with English is that the colonies each spent relatively long periods in relative isolation. Nowadays there is a certain degree of accent flattening, at least within the US. The Tower, even with different "countries" owning different levels, is inherently more integrated, both physically and through internet or internet style systems. Languages naturally drift, but it is that drift plus barriers that allow them to drift apart. Languages in communication with each other move towards homogenization, like with word borrowings, creoles, or the English integration we are starting to see in places like India, Philippines and similar.
@@jamesbleckley7872 And yet I still see divergence in Texas English and that of Alabama, New York, California, Arkansas, Oklahoma, etc. You also see it in Latin America where in different parts of the same country even a word could have different meanings do to slang changes.
I could see this happening as different levels of the tower became dominated by different ethnic and linguistic groups even if they spoke the same language they would have different influences on that language.
It seems hard to know. Let's see what Isaac et al have planned for the 2323 episode
@@jamesbleckley7872 just remember how many thousand years this tower has lasted, and how long an elevator ride could get. There is separation in time and space. Internet might slow it, but it might be its own language and “hallway slang” is the local language.
Given the idea that building sky scrapers only makes sense when the land you build on is too expensive to expand horizontally ... it makes me think space habitats would only make sense when natural land prices on Earth (or elsewhere?) is so expensive you have to build your own land to build those buildings on.
If covering the Earth with sky scrapers could support on the order of 100 trillion people by the calculations in this video, I wonder I wounder what the human population would have to be in order for the creation of a space habitat would be cheaper than building more or taller sky scrapers.
Space infrastructure for energy, manufacturing, and mining has several advantages, so I wouldn't be surprised if space habitats become cost effective before heat dissipation becomes a limiting factor for earths population. Especially since it has mobility advantages and allows egocentric individuals to build their own personal worlds both of which can justify significantly higher costs than buying land on earth.
9:13 wait, who says we must fill the space of the buildings with the maximum number of people possible?, a tiny fraction of those millians of people would be more than enough to maintain the towers and that way you dont have regular problams with blocked pasages up or down the tower which would defeat hte point of them in the first place.
You will need 6 elevators all linked in space.
Right on bedtime!
Another great show, Isaac. Thanks
I want to reach space with my UFO we keep hearing so much about lately. But that is just me.
I feel like I was ripped off, you mentioned Jupiter in an episode about space towers and didn't bring up a Jupiter spear.
Jupiter has no solid surface so a space tower prolly wouldn't make much sense. Still doable mind you, but not really sensible
@@virutech32 hypothetically possible is the name of the game here
@@seb-fluffysnowcap9530 Fair enough. Thas the right attitude👍Might not be able to support that with buoyancy though. Fusion candles, an in-atmos orbital ring, a full OR shell, hell with active-support it might even be possible to extend a tower's foundation deep enough that buoyancy is enough or maybe even all the way to the solid core. Go big or go home i guess
space sling please :D
A Titan tower that's not a T shape? Rediculous 😂
Well you do need to put a mass driver up there to launch things from at high speed so the T seems completely justified.
I'm imagining a series of these thing presented every way it's been presented in the show(OG TT cuz im not heathen). The times its been taken over, ruined, the future version, etc.
The scale of a birch planet is honestly mind boggling.
If you wanted, you could manufacture a space tower, lightyears tall that is capable of launching *entire planets* into orbit, and it wouldnt even be visible a quarter through the planet
The scale of a normal planet is mind boggling, a Birch Planet is simply mind-shattering :)
@@isaacarthurSFIA I complained above that "birch planets" made no sense to me because the largest megastructures I am familiar with in fiction are Dyson's Spheres, Ring Worlds and Alderson Discs. Can you please tell me if you have another episode that explains what the hell a "birch world" is? and how the hell its so much bigger than a Dyson's Sphere or Alderson Disc and why it is not listed on Wikipedia along with the other hypothetical megastructures? Maybe do an entire show on JUST THAT? You barely mentioned it and gave no explanation that I could identify with. You cannot just SAY something is that big and expect most people to comprehend it.
@@Zurround he’s discussed the concept before, and it gets wild. Start with a shell world, layer after layer of planetary surface. Now, the innermost layer surrounds Sagittarius A* (the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy) at the distance where gravity is one G. And you have billions of levels. He wasn’t kidding about looking out on a disassembled galaxy.
@@highlorddarkstar I am sorry but I cannot comprehend this and I CAN comprehend Dyson's sphere and Alderson Disc. He seriously needs to do an entire show on JUST THAT ONE THING ITS THAT DAMNED BIG.
@@highlorddarkstar a sagA* birch world would be on the low end of size, at only 4 million solaf masses, it would be several hundred AU in diameter.
A birch planet's size is capped by the fact the radius of the black hole (the event horizon) has less surface gravity the more mass it has (but more gravity in total). The cap for a 1g birch world would be a trillion solar masses, around the mass of the milky way and a lightyear wide.
To put these 2 into perspective, you could build the entirety of the first birch world *inside the habitable layers of the second*
"With many different languages." Nice Babel reference!
🙌 👏 🙏 🤝 👍 you BET ! This is exactly what´s been my first thought too. We are in perfect END Times -> "pride comes before the fall". . . .
Love your work Isaac top notch as always
A great addition to the megastructures series! Though it pales in comparison to some of the truly huge structures you’ve presented in the past, it’s much closer to what we can realistically imagine now.
No, its total fantasy , this is a fantasy channel rapped up in the most extreme version of what`s possible possible . Like its scientifically possible for a giant alien spaceship to swallow the sun for lols type possible.
@@Dan-dy8zp Yes , not total fantasy , that's all i was saying . But one shouldn't mix the two without explicitly saying so and where.
As always the sheer scale of the things you portray is made all the more awe inspiring when I consider how grounded and scientifically real they can be.
Wonderful work as always.
That "birch planet" thing was too confusing for me and did NOT have enough of a description beyond how impossibly big it was. Can we please all ask him to elaborate further or maybe do an entire show on JUST THAT? I think its even more impressive than the Dyson's Sphere on the Star Trek Next Gen episode "Relics"?
@@Zurround He has covered Birch Planets in his Megastructures Compendium episode. You can find it timestamped in the description.
I just couldn't believe the levels of maintenance that would be required in these structures. The first thing that tripped me up was all the vacuum seals needed. Yes, they can be built, but what happens WHEN they fail. You can section off your vacuum tunnels, but what happens when the segment seals, that haven't been used in fourty years, don't close.
In my job, I deal with steam, hot water, oxygen, and vacuum lines as well as elevators.
There are elevators that are just abandoned because you can't get parts for them after a hundred years.
All these basic engineering ideas are possible, but not always maintainable. All these active components make me think of steam power.
Not many buildings use steam anymore. The technology to use it exists and is well understood. It's very old tech. Steam is really useful for a lot of things, but even though we have it, we're phasing it out. Why? Because it's corrosive and eats through steel. A good friend of mine was killed by a bursting steam line. You can't handle the lines, they're too hot. You need to staff the building round the clock in case of a boiler failure. A million little reasons pile up as the system ages and makes it very hard to keep everything working.
What happens when the entity that owned the structure is no longer around? What if a sundial structure is abandoned?
Building them is one thing. Maintenance for the next forty to a hundred years is a different issue.
Why can't humanity as a whole own it.
@@bristoled93 I don't think we have a framework for that. If you figure it out it would be a valuable concept. Until then, places that are owned by everyone are maintained by nobody. It's called "the tragedy of the commons." Figure out a way, because no one else has.
Otherwise it's owned by a government or corporation. Having multiple bodies in control is a recipe for disaster. Image of the international space station was a 100 mile tall tower. One body pulls out and there's talk of abandoning it.
Government isn't much better, one administration would do everything right but eventually you'd get a group that thought it was a waste and intentionally neglect it.
Happy Arthursday 🎉🎉🎉 Early gang for the win
Did you mean feliz jueves
Less goo! Arthursday
Happy Arthursday
@@madcircle7311 15:12
@@madcircle7311 15:43
Hearing him describe a glimpse of a 230th century world makes me wish he’d do an episode just imagining the world(s) people might inhabit a million or so years from now. Tbh I haven’t watched SFIA in quite a while, and if this is the norm now then I’ll probably rewatch the last 100 episodes.
I've been VERY excited about this episode! It's a subject I'm fascinated in, and there was no 100% no disappointment!! Great episode, sir!! I would love to live to see space towers being built!
Imagine the moment you suddenly become weightless in the elevator and realize you are now in space!
At 100 miles high u wouls still experience 99.99% gravity so no
Just wanted to say FIRST been watching for god.. has it been 8 yearS? Love you bro
Hey Isaac! Love this one only because it scares the life out of me. Greetings from MCMurdo station. 😁👍
You should be safe from falling at least!
Avoid reading any Lovecraft till you get home. 😅😅
@@garyjenkins7249 Nope not reading any of that! Been dark for 2 months now 🤣 lol
Is it nice this time of year?
Balmy temps, almost up to 0 Fahrenheit, ice as far as the eye can see?
No reference to the Space Elevator that gets destroyed in the Foundation? It's incredible to see it come down and I love how they had it drag across the city as it came down
Watching stuff like this just makes me wonder why we aren’t working on projects like this now. It feels like it should be a priority.
The Powers That Be decided to focus on Chicken Nuggets, genitalia and Cardi B instead.
@@lavenderlilacproductions or power & money. Niccolo Machiavelli is right yet again, 500 years later
@@lavenderlilacproductions I hate every bit of the truth of this comment
@@lavenderlilacproductions It doesn’t help that a vocal minority are encouraging politicians to focus on culture war issues and performative politics instead of projects like this that would actually unite us, or even other things that would practically improve our lives.
@@UpliftedCapybara Careful saying something will unite us. Remember 30 years ago people believed that easy access to information would eliminate misinformation..
Topic request: The end of time - what happens when a Dyson swarm is abandoned and left to its own devices. Do planets reform? Are they on any plane? Would the planet be more homogenous than typical? What other unique features would there be? Would any be detectable from a long-away observation with a telescope?
You need to be able to control the weather also. An F-4 or 5 tornado will make mince meat out of a tower. Hurricane wind is slower than a tornado, however, they hang around longer.
🙌 👏 🙏 🤝 👍 great thoughts . . . .
Did see on video on what will happen if a Tornado hit a skyscraper have not watched it yet
lol...climate and space weather are so important to this heavy industrial space elevator, too heavy and weak to meets uncertainty.
Sabotaging and watching a Space Elevator Tower collapse sounds like an Excellent thing to see in a James Bond flick.. Earth Raker. Wonder if they would also have Power Plants staggered along this 100 mile highway to the latest platform spaceport. Pumping out greenhouse gases or solar or wind powered. Would there be multiple cable highways.. with Buccees along the way?
Solar panels would be deployed in space as they are far more efficient there. Wind would be none existent the higher you got as the pressure needed to move the fans would drop off quickly. Also need too much space for wind power than the tower would provide. Fossil Fuel plants would be impractical as you would have to move the material up to them to burn. It would be much easier to have the plants on the ground, then pump the electricity and waste gas up to the top. Waste gas being used as pressurized launch system for spacecraft to "blow" them clear of the port before they ignite their own propulsion.
I say Isaac Arthur's tag line should be "Can we build bigger? YES!"
"If brute force isn't working your not using enough of it"
They could do a shirt of Arthur once said:
Suddenly, the idea of DM-Morpheus from Unreal does not seem that ridiculous anymore.
Dude, your stuff is always so inspirational. I have a story set in 2380 so you bet I am going to keep an eye on that episode.
Just what I was thinking, I always thought they were absurd, but not, that map seems ahead of it's time.
after the first space towers video and the orbital ring video i was imagining a series of space towers connected to an orbital ring. i did a bit of messing around in blender to create the active support loops... i had it start out wider at the bottom and was using large islands as the size references...... i still have a graphic i made to show where the different layers of the atmosphere and ocean heights.... and it has some boxes that i think i was using for the base....
basically i was picturing building a bunch of space towers that all leaned on each other to create like a mountain that reaches up into space... that could probably house and support the entire human population including all their food productions and industrial needs.... and i was like we should build a few of these all connected to an orbital ring.... like continent class arcologies lol.
You may be interested to check out Gundam 00, it features exactly such a setup
Space towers could be one of the many incredible technological and architectural breakthroughs ever.
Or as a tool for a powerful nation to spread its influence, especially if it's space based solar power.
Excellent video Isaac and team! Beautiful artwork and sound. Can't wait to see the future episodes around Digital Afterlives and Lunar Mining.
I’m dreaming big, and I wish I could experience the ideas you convey with such talent!
I like the version of Orbital Towers in the book:
3001, The Final Odyssey
Arthur C Clarke.
And refer to when something goes awry with such a tower in the Mars Trilogy (Red, Green and Blue) by Kim Stanley Robinson.
Even for people who are NOT considered acrophobic and are ok with being in a tall real life building these buildings might be too scary for them. I get nervous thinking about it.
The view would be AMAZING!
Old pilot here, I love to go high.
That's one of the things that irks me in Sci Fi settings where they have anti gravity and gravity control.
That stuff is an obscene cheat code and we should have things that would make WH40k artists blush at the audacity.
Putting advertisements outside on the building does make no sense in a height of 500 m
Then can there be a post apocalyptic story of stone age people growing up in labyrinths thinking that's all there is to their world. Then the protagonist finds out they are all in the middle of a space tower?
anything falling from a tower will be at terminal velocity in air. a cable, even a foot thick, will be below 200 mph, and really won't cause much, if any significant damage. because they are not at orbital velocity, but at ground velocity.
Some objects have an extremely high terminal velocity (tungsten rods for example)
better still use flat ribbons instead of round cable for lower terminal velocity
Ah yes, DM-Morpheus, great map.
Always looked on these projects as a logistical nightmare wrought in... whatever tensile super materials are in the news this decade.
I loved the partial gravity and the long jumps. What a game.
I was searching for this in the comments section
I imagined how a 1950s sci-fi might envision a space tower and space train, at least up to 30 km maybe. A large hydrogen balloon tows miles of chain-spring-cable to provide a taut vertical "tower" where a track can be fitted around it and going up in a spiral. The train could run on diesel and then switch to a rocket mechanism as it nears the top.
The US GDP is $23 trillion. Three centuries at 2% works out to ~$1 trillion per hour just for a hypothetical future US.
World GDP would work out to about $4 trillion/hr, but there's no way conditions would remain the same for ten generations!!! 8-P
I was waiting for somebody to work out that economic claim 😂
Why not build in a double helix? Major elevator in the center, surrounded by structural helix, and 5-20 floor elevators can fit in-between the helix reinforcement.
That would be a neat design
Notification squad!!!
The heat dissipated by a tower that is wide would possibly impact local stratospheric conditions and create weather phenomena. I'm still worried about how vulnerable this would be to hostile action.
It would be like an inverted chimney. Or heat is transported up the tower for this very reason and only radiated away above the atmosphere. With a lot of radiators....
in the 80's there was some discussion of how tall a building could be built with present technology, it boiled down to the only limitation being elevator technology, yet without that limitation... 11kilometres.
Great content! I would just like to add that, even at the modest height of modern-day skyscrapers, wind loads are a much better deal than gravity loads... meaning that most of the steel on those structures goes towards directing horizontal forces to the terrain. Remove the weather, and then we can talk.
Beyond certain heights, these structures would have to be protected by a flotilla of buoyant windmills. These would reduce the speed of the winds 🎯 the structure. As a bonus, these could power some of the tower.
No matter what you call it, prepare everything and everyone for the cyclone, typhoon, or hurricane.
Toilets! How thick a sewer pipe do you need per person? At 40 flats per floor and 12 cm squared for a very minimal toilet connection, that is about 500 square centimeters per floor. Multiply that by 50,000 floors and you have a requirement for a sewer pipe 2,500 square meters or a square 50 by 50 meters; That is about that 200 foot by 200 foot size specified for the Houston tower. How much square area for all the electrical lines, water for the kitchen, drains to get the bath water returned, air supply and internet connections? Probably far more as you have to get the atmosphere up to the 50,000th floor and then move the stale air out.
You have a near vacuum at perhaps 20 km on up, but it is the same human 15 psi all the way up. That's a HUGE amount of air to move.
You have a lot of heat to dissipate in a vacuum. When the tower is sunlit, how hot will the top stories be?
What about radiation? Effectively, you are in outer space.
2 words: Buckling and wind. The engineering challenges of building a tall, thin building, without some form of active support, are nigh insurmountable. Plus, why would you try this when orbital rings make so much more sense?
Videos on space towers and space elevators always fail to address a totally breaking factor that make such things a horrendous idea: conductivity. You'd have to make the entire thing out of a material more resistant than the atmosphere and even if you do so you still have to consider the amount of heat generation from that resistive material.
The voltage differential between significant altitudes is large, and if you want to pass through layers like the ionosphere or higher, you're talking a lightning rod to end all lightning rods; such a thing, if able to survive, would likely have a permanent superstorm around is and have an electric field generated around it off the scale.
There is a very peculiar balance for a structure tethered to Earth to have to stay at a specific strength when flying around the planet tethered... adding mass to the end of that structure will multiply the stress along the tether, compounding it for every pound added. You might find the ability to send things up there will be vastly limited, therefore rocket launching payloads still economical compared to that of the space tower- but it will still have used for ferrying astronauts to space, and smaller satellite like payloads. Larger things such as that of things like Hubble sized or JWST, would not be possible, you would need to build it up upon the platform... and manage that mass accordingly.
This is cool, luckily we won't have to worry about the rich and the poor when we're ready to end poverty and capitalism and start doing this, so really anyone can go to The Sundial, as long as there's room 😉👌
Been watching Isaac since the beginning and he's still just as good if not better
One thing about the Tower of Babel story. It was destroyed because people were cooperating and could do anything if they put their minds to it.
God was just afraid of humanity.
What stops these towers from tipping over during contruction?
These are actively-supported structures. The same tech that let's u build hundreds of km up let's u build angled supports like compressive guy wires.
🙌 👏 🙏 🤝 👍 pride comes before the fall ! One single earthquake will finish this. See what happened in turkey recently . . .
@@AL_THOMAS_777 Earthquakes don't happen everywhere.
If the radiation fins were vertical the heating air around them would move up and push the fins with drag, wouldn't it? Could that do some active suport?
Can't help but wonder what cyclical tidal forces from the moon would do to either the tower (significant mass) or the tether (slightly closer lunar proximity {22k miles isn't nothing} + mass). Likely some significant issues.
When I see those tall, thin buildings, all I can think of is that they would fall over easily. I'm probably wrong but that's what my brain can't get past.
Yeah, its really the best to put the whole of humanity in o n e singular tower - and the rest of mother earth (flora and fauna) will live in utterly quietitude and peace . . .
They should build a huge magnetic railgun system up the side of a mountain that is capable of shooting ships and payloads into space.
I'm just having a moment of incredulity at the pressure in water and sewerage piping in a 100 mile tower. Personal imagination failure does not make anything impossible, of course, but...wow. Somehow, that's even harder to wrap my head around than the scale of the Horsehead. I mean, it's less than the depth of the Marianas Trench, but even so those are going to be some /immense/ pipes.
The Burj Khalifa ships all of its waste out in trucks, and it's only a small fraction of the height of these concepts.
@@Ducky69247 That's a Dubai thing, nothing to do with towers.
Biggest issue to me is not science or engineering. It is the political and fiscal will to build one or even more than that.
Thinking about a place so impossibly big and so impossibly full of people and history, it is both awing and scary.
"Sir - may I be excused - my brain is full!" Great episode.
Glorious Arthursday folks, hopefully its good weather where you are.
23:42 flashback to “is there a black hole with a surface gravity of 1G at its event horizon? “YES.” It would mass 1.5x10^12 solar masses and have a diameter or nearly one light year. That is the largest megastructure we could build under known physics. Ok WhYYY would you build such a thing?“ from the megaearths episode.
24:45 well whaddya know?
Love your stuff Isaac. Incidentally we share the same birthday. :)
Does this remind anyone of you of the building of the TOWER OF BABYLON ? And look, how this disaster ended . .
Says who?
Sorry Im late, I took the stairs.
I was contemplating the CN Tower stair climb, then this video came out...
We can wait (assuming radical life extension is in the cards)
How do the lower floors support the weight of the thousands of floor's above them?
Well if you can build a tower that reach to space, you can put in the top of it a pendulum like device that can generate horizontal velocity for a payload sended from the ground, would be like a rotating skyhook attached to the top of a space tower, and every times when complete a rotation can deliver a payload to a stable orbit. Actually probably you don't need the tower to be so much taller, you only need to get out of the thicker part of atmosphere,tall enough to allow the rotating arms to work without air drag.
So, just spitballing here, but what about using a combination of compressive and tensile strength, where the bottom is supported by compressive strength and the top by tensile?
Would be a nice view. I usually enjoy a view in an elevator
i love the visual of billboards on the side of a kilometer tall structure, definitely good use of advertising budget putting a pepsi logo 5 kilometers in the air on a 10 meter billboard
Hi it was me who made those visuals for this video - yeah I was laughing too when i made them; like who can even see them?? haha
@@ydvisual5530 thanks for contributing to the video, I love the visuals isaac runs in the background :)
this is a personal petition please hold off on using AI-generated art until it has its ethical sourcing of training data sorted out please.
Petition ignored. Artists should make better art.
Saudi Arabia: "Write this down!"
Excellent episode! Ive been wondering about developments in material sciences, and if ee have the technology to build pyramids reaching above the atmosphere.
Bro, please thinking about circulating laser beam, Lorentz traversable wormholes, quantum tunneling, symmetric portal, time pulsar gates...as so-called space elevators. Please don't waste traditional steel industrial as modern space projects.
So finally, we are building a tower in to havens...about time, these rocket launchers did make me tired and what a waste of fuel. So we can not build a spinner elevator, as it will not counter the Earth spin, to bad. Some stuff just do not work until the base line goes to 26 000 KM+,- that is a distance we can not play with. So lets build that tower.....good place to build a base for it....Mongolia ? solid mountain basement, he he. So we need to go up , minimum to low Earth orbit, so 100 km + and build a counter weight space station for balance....so the base need to be circle with D=100 km, like a cylinder in to the sky, the cylinder needs to be wind passive and hallow inside, need to stay put, resist strains of 1000 tons pressure per 1 km...uh that would be hard to do, so the base need to be bigger to spread the load, let say 400 km for a D, that is BIG construction project....Prince of S. Arabia is building than NOAM city 200 KM long and 300m to maybe 500m tall,- this is a LARGE construction, lets see if Arabs will pull it off, now a tower of BABBLE2 100km high and 400km at the base...that is a total different ball game in human engineering.TH
Ps we could have base of 200km or 300 km and so on, but as so far we have no material to take the weight, pressure, and temperature differences, but nano-tubes or supper carbon ,- start to work out the problem if we play 400 km base. We shall see.
NOTIFICATION GANG!!
I loved the book Horizons Unlimited back when I was in civil air patrol back when I was a kid airforce auxiliary 46046 squad lol back in the 90s,,,good times 😊❤stay safe out there Aloha's
When I grow up, I wanna be as impressive as Arthur.
Question ------ Do you ever look at GPT and where do you think it is going to that will be a good video for you to make.
There is literally no way one of these towers would stop at geostationary, they would extend (almost) the same distance out to provide -1G habitats where residents would look 'up' to see earth, this also provides vastly superior launch facilities, offering around twice the initial velocity/energy as a geostationary launch..... AND as it is now a balanced structure; near zero force on earth's crust (probably actually pulling up just a tiny bit).
This also massively negates any issues with damage at the base, should the tower burn at the base and snap off, the whole structure would just drift up into an elliptical orbit, coming back to the surface (all be it in a different location).
[I'd tell you how long it would take and how far away from its initial location it would come back down, but its been 20+ years, I've forgotten all my engineering, the last time I tried to do a calculation like that, it took me 6 hours.... educated guess however: 1000 miles due east, 25 hours later.... don't quote me on that, but I bet I'm pretty damn close]
Construction would in fact need to start at geostationary and extend up and down maintaining balance until contact was made with the surface, that way the whole system is in constant tension, making it inherently stable, not the unstable compressive [impending] disaster any attempt to build from the surface up would inevitably turn into the first time the wind got up.
Yes, I've spent way too long thinking about this over the last few years ;)
One thing is certain, $10,000+ per kilo just to get off Earth will NOT get us to the stars! If we want spacesteads, lunar and martian colonies, space tourism for more people than just billionaires, , etc, we are going to HAVE TO lower launch costs significantly!
Heh... the sweet memory that silly tall tower gives me. We built an actual tower - a massive one - as tall as you could ever make - on a virtual world. Well I helped, my husband, then BF, made it over ONE NIGHT - cause our old place on old sim was lost due the virtual bit of land being sold by the land lord - all of which had made me kinda sad. Damned sweet of him. But that thing became a huge land mark on the new sim. Had special rights for it, cause you could see it never mind where you were on that bit of virtual land or up in the air... all the way to how high the sky reached.
It had all sorts of parts - seemingly floating and so forth - and every more solid like part had strange chamber or environment hidden within. Those we did make later, after the main structure was done. Obviously we had our own 'bed chamber' at the top, you know a private space. And with that a tiny roof top garden with two cherry trees twisted around each other at the very top, and bellow that chamber a building plate, you know a location to make more stuff at. Anyhow aside to also having a guest room - there were a lot more, much stranger chambers in that tower. It's boring to try and build with other clickable parts of environment around you so having access to open sky back ground is kinda must for appropriate building place. But on those chambers, the secret bits of a strange universe within all of them. A kind of grinder to get rid of 'dead old avatars' - yea that was like one of those skeleton crypts with mechanical parts to it and a puzzle to figure out how to get away from there. Oh, and a inside garden. Cyber prison. A kind of snow white AI chamber, with bit of odd liquid about and a strange book. Every part like the crypt-grinder thing - a puzzle to move up. And eventually even a chamber with teleport portals that would randomly more or less send you up or down to some other chamber - sometimes to other parts of the virtual world entirely. Stupid thing was that people aren't curious enough or patient enough to try to solve in-game games like that. So they just try to fly lazy to look around it - obviously we forbid that but such settings are almost like made to be circumvented. Regardless we had quite a bit of folk just look at it.
I did make video of the place when we moved to next sim. This time voluntarily, mostly due different land rules, better price from same owner who is damned cool and reliable. That 'land' we still got - all thought this one we have rebuilt at least 3 times since due game related changes that made something not work right - lol. Idk why they got to tweak their damned script language so much. No, it's not a tower anymore - you got to change things around you know. Oh, almost forgot - while my husband build I make textures - so the on ground portion of the tower had a tiny texture store. I don't really sell that stuff anymore apart from random samples on the game market - but the point is that sometimes you don't want to share too much in the end. More fun to see them used on our own things, lol. But it was from that ground area that had two ways to end up 'transported' into the upper parts of the tower. No you can't think the spaces were really large and complicated. We did a lot with those textures alone, cause there is limits to how many building parts you can use on such virtual lands and it's sincerely too expensive to own the entire sim - lol. But seeing a tower that just reaches up and up like without an end sends me right back to the beginning of our relationship, our online dates - cause I lived in a different country, so at the time we could not really have usual dates that often. Anyhow some tower can be the sweetest gestures one remembers.
At first I thought these would be thin towers with maybe a few 100 sqm per floor but when you described it to be 10 sqkm per floor, my mind was blown to bits. I was lost in thoughts since it's magnitude its beyond imaginations. Tho it sounds crazy you made it sounds plausible in just 300 years. Maybe not 300 but 1000s but if humanity survive that long without destroying ourselves then I'm sure it will be done.
Perhaps the best Option for a "window" in space, is a TV screen. Solves not just radiation and stability problems, but also allows for advertisements (and quite frankly the view of Earth might get boring quite soon)
Re episode: Paranoid Aliens
Isaac's imagining of technological aliens leans very strongly towards an assumption that our communal nature is necessary to become high tech. If our children didn't take so much work to raise, we might not be so cooperative. I can imagine aliens whose philosophy was incapable of predicting things like 3rd party retaliation for genocidal colonization.
Team work for building tech makes sense, but how accuate is it? An episode on the evolution of non-communal, non-hivemind technological hermit species would be interesting.
I once did a little calculation. viennas most populated district is brigittenau with something around 26000 citizen per km², and hydroponics allow feeding up to 50.000 people per square kilometer.
I'm not sure what calculation I exactly did, but austria could host over 2 billion people alone and supply them with food. but good luck with a diet that is comprised of sweet potatoe.
there are bigger countries out there.
the main concern at having such dense populations is: supplying them with energy means, that there needs to be a well engineered cooling system, or otherwise this will just heat up to levels that do not allow people to survive.
sorry but I don't see any space elevators or sky towers happening in the US, the country can't produce a decent railway system I don't think they could embark into something that complex, expensive and hard to maintain. China, India, some place in the Middle East or Europe sure but the US I highly doubt it.
Face suckers as oxygen life support? Uughhh - and I actually had to buy parts for my CPAP machine this morning - now I may never sleep again!
you know . . . this sounds a bit like the "X-SEED_5000" . . . interesting concept for sure but pretty extreme one at that
definitely something that belongs in the far future
Can someone explain how such a structure would stay in orbit? Don't get me wrong, I kind of get how it stays there by itself when static. I just don't follow how it would stay there once you started lifting something. I mean, you are essentially adding kinetic energy to the object you are lifting. Where does that energy come from if not from the elevator itself? Why wouldn't the elevator's orbit speed slow down and thus start to drop out of orbit? Or at least get pulled downward slightly and thus require it be pulled back up? Or did he explain this and I just missed it?
So excited for the upcoming episodes
They all sound like they’ll give us a lot to think about, which are my favorite kind of episodes.
Some interesting visions, but more suited to a dystopian sci-fi story (of which there are too many already) rather than a likely reality. Realistically, a basic launch loop and rotating orbital habitats would be far more practical, with no unobtainium required. Modular networks beat heirarchical structures every time.
Today we built up into the heavens, but what about digging down into hell? How deep can we tunnel? Heat is an obvious bottlekneck, and the immense pressures of even just a few dozen meters of dirt and rock can't be overstated.
Yet mining operations and even some caves can be found multiple kilometers underground.
I hope you're writing about how it's possible for the real world to become the X Files. Maybe bring up a leaker who says something about flying ships not of human origin. Oh My Motherlovin God.. Why aren't more people going nuts over this?
The problem with building space elevators on Earth is that the proposition assumes that having established a large scale civilization in space that enough people would be interested in visiting the surface of a dirty, dangerous, magma filled water balloon like Earth to be worth bothering. When you can build any real environment that physics allows and any virtual environment you can imagine, what's the point of subjecting yourself to the hassle of descending to a planetary surface?