http://www.tomsguide.com/us/japanese-space-elevat…
Obayashi unveiled a project, which envisions a huge elevator that will be moved by cables to a terminal station located at an altitude of 36,000 km or 22,370 miles. The company says it would use carbon nanotubes to manufacture the cables and stabilize them in air and space using a massive counterweight at 96,000 kilometers (59,650 miles) above the surface of earth.The elevator is expected to be able to carry up to 30 people at a time, but don't expect to be able to hop on it spontaneously. Obayashi said that the elevator may be traveling at a speed of 200 km/h (124 MPH), which means that the a one-way trip will take about 180 hours or 7.5 days. However, once at the destination, passengers can enjoy plenty of room for laboratories and living space, Obayashi said. The facility will also be connected to huge solar panels that generate enough power for the space station and transmit excess power down to the surface.
So, how expensive is it to manufacture and deploy almost 120,000 miles of carbon nanotube cables in space, build a space station and develop an elevator that travels at 124 MPH? Obayashi said it has no idea, but they now have a project in place and "try" to make progress to make sure a space elevator "won't end just up as simply a dream.
Sweet. Hopefully they get this done before WW3, so we can colonize mars and make sure humanities seed fills the universe.
You're a geek like me, Seabird. I read about this a week or two ago. It seems the biggest foreseeable hurdle is the tensile strength of the cable. Will the nanotubes provide a solution? I hope so.
This is so interesting to me. You read Ender's Game and follow the Halo canon and wonder when we'll actually put our petty squabbles as humans aside and work together to do something meaningful again.
2050!? That's five whole fucking years after Kurzweil's predicted Singularity date, which, by that point in our expected advancement, will be a technological eternity. Given the predicted rate of technological growth by an overwhelming majority of futurologists, 2050 seems absurdly late. I bet this happens in the private sector a full decade before then.
I'm be 60 by then, I'm be so old...
You won't feel 60 by today's standards though. The next revolution (the current being the information revolution via the internet) will be in biotech: prosthetics, pharmaceuticals, and other life-extending advances followed by integration with nanotech and AI (there's serious literature on this, I'm not fucking with you!). Basically, what I'm trying to get at is that by the time we're both 60, 60 won't be considered old - in fact, you could be more "in your prime" then than you are currently.
There's a lot of futurology literature, video, etc. on this stuff, look into the Singularity if you're interested in learning more.
This (old) video shows that they can extend the nanotubes from their normal length to threads that they could intertwine.
Whether it can make it 96000 KM is hard to say; perhaps if it is just thick enough? I would be interested in seeing what sort of a counterweight they had in mind. Im also curious of whether this would solve the problem involved in constructing a ring that'd be held in place by centripetal force because it would have to hold the counterweight, as opposed to retaining its structure? Where the hell is illiniprogrammer?
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