Report in the Telegraph, says Japanese construction firm will build a space elevator in 40 years.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/9098048/Space-elevator-could-be-built-in-40-years.html

The Space elevator is one of those things that look good on paper but to me defies any logical means of construction. I can see how it would operate and stay in place after it is built but I can't figure out how it would be erected before tearing itself up.

---

Bob DeWoody

My motto: Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow as it may not be required. This no longer applies in light of current events.

The company said it would carry up to 30 passengers at a time and travel at a speed of 120mph for a week, stopping off at a station at 22,370 miles.

Tourists would stay there, but researchers and specialists would be able to travel all the way to the end, said Satomi Katsuyama, the project's leader.

Surprised at the Torygraph, this is pure science fiction ....

That's what they said about Arthur C Clarkes prediction about geo-stationary satellites in 1947. The Space elevator is also one of his idea's and about 10 years go they said that material stength only had to be increased about 100 fold for it to be possible.

Really so?

It's so nice to have your feets safe on the ground and still be able to have a look out into black space through a window!

The Space elevator is one of those things that look good on paper but to me defies any logical means of construction. I can see how it would operate and stay in place after it is built but I can't figure out how it would be erected before tearing itself up.

My view and therefore probably totally impractical (another way of saying stupid);
Build geostationary space station
Ferry to space station 24,000 miles of very strong but light string.
Fix firmly to space station and then take free end back to earth
Use this string to drag stronger thicker rope up to space station
repeat as necessary, until strong enough to fix elevator to it.

see, easy, but with so many holes in it, it probably is impractical now.

Anyway, it was the Star Trek movies that came to my mind when reading this.

"Beam me up, Scotty", he said.

I am a little unsure about the name being used here, but as far as I remember this, it was Scotty for his name.

Such a device would be a teletransporter or maybe teleporter system.

What I have read, in order for something like this to work, the atoms in your body will need to be annihilated or
disassembled at the starting point and then re-assembled or put back in its original place when arriving at the destination place.

The Two err 3 main problems i see are the earths wobble, Wind, and the massive amount of space junk floating around our planet. Lets also not forget that the elevator would have to pass through a layer of satellites then have to be sheilded from the routine meteor shower for which the earth is constantly being exposed.

---

In a rich man's house there is no place to spit but his face.
Diogenes Of Sinope

Anyway, it was the Star Trek movies that came to my mind when reading this.

"Beam me up, Scotty", he said.

I am a little unsure about the name being used here, but as far as I remember this, it was Scotty for his name.

Such a device would be a teletransporter or maybe teleporter system.

What I have read, in order for something like this to work, the atoms in your body will need to be annihilated or
disassembled at the starting point and then re-assembled or put back in its original place when arriving at the destination place.

teleporting is a totally different subject and other than being impossible at this time has nothing to do with the space elevator concept.

---

Bob DeWoody

My motto: Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow as it may not be required. This no longer applies in light of current events.

Let me have a closer look and see what I can find:

If some kind of intelligence should ever be found existing outside earth, either in space or on a planet orbiting another star, how do you possibly put such an intelligence into kind of a context?

Could you possibly think of or rank such a possible intelligence such by means of a possible scale?

There is presumed to be Type 0, Type 1, Type 2, or maybe even Type 3 civilizations existing in space outside earth.

Until now, there is of course no confirmation of the existence of any such intelligence outside earth and everything should be thought of or regarded as being a pure guess only.

Still, why not give it a try?

There is an explanation for the so-called Kardashev scale which can be found at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale .

If you should happen to fancy watching movies on television, you may think of Buck Rogers as being a Type 1 civilization. By the way, I am not familiar with Buck Rogers.

More familiar perhaps is the Star Trek television series ("Scotty, beam me up!").

This series centers around a thought Type 2 civilization.

And finally, for a Type 3 civilization, we have the Star Wars movies originally meant for the cinema, but now available for watching at home on DVD's, etc.

But these civilizations are technological (meaning material) civilizations. No angels and possibly no devils are readily apparent by means of their presence in these series or movies by means of their spirits alone here.

The Two err 3 main problems i see are the earths wobble, Wind, and the massive amount of space junk floating around our planet. Lets also not forget that the elevator would have to pass through a layer of satellites then have to be sheilded from the routine meteor shower for which the earth is constantly being exposed.

Wind shouldn't be a problem since the majority of the mass of the thing will be well above the atmosphere. Kind of like an ant pushing on your shoe. You wouldn't even notice it.

Space junk and meteor showers are related issues and solvable. First, decide what the smallest bit of space debris can do damage, then build detection systems that can detect that size of an object far enough away to allow time for lasers (or something similar) to shoot 'em down.

Dunno about Earth wobble. Maybe it would just wobble along with it? I'll have to muse on that one for a bit.

Still, since the whole thing is pie-in-the-sky <snicker>, we can invent all sorts of technical gizmo's to make it work.

---

Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.

Albert Einstein

Don't think earth wobble comes into it. If the earth did wobble all the geo-stationary satellites that we use for communications like TV wouldn't work, because the footprint they transmit too must always be covered.

And for an elevator to work the destintion needs to be stationary, so it will therefore be in that 23,000 mile (36,000km) orbit, that the comms sats use.

GPS satellites are being continuously updated to account for relativity. within days they'd be so far off for locations that they'd be useless. Pluss non-military GPS is only good within 10-15 meters IIRC

One of the most significant error sources is the GPS receiver's clock. Because of the very large value of the speed of light, c, the estimated distances from the GPS receiver to the satellites, the pseudoranges, are very sensitive to errors in the GPS receiver clock; for example an error of one microsecond (0.000 001 second) corresponds to an error of 300 metres (980 ft). This suggests that an extremely accurate and expensive clock is required for the GPS receiver to work. Because manufacturers prefer to build inexpensive GPS receivers for mass markets, the solution for this dilemma is based on the way sphere surfaces intersect in the GPS problem.

The earths wobble is only about 10-20 meters a year so it pretty much falls into the margin of error for a civilian GPS device.

However having a device hanging out at 22k miles and having to keep the line taught at all times would prove nerve wricking even for a machine. Depending on the material used the top of the elevator would have to be able to move with the wobble otherwise I would suspect minor ossilations would occur along the shaft. So the problem is how to keep a 22,000 mile long string straight.

---

In a rich man's house there is no place to spit but his face.
Diogenes Of Sinope

GPS receivers are actually quite accurate. A few years ago, when I worked for a water taxi service, our units routinely gave better than 10m accuracy. For example, at the end of the day, when I tied up at the pier, I could pinpoint which end of the pier I was closest to with just the GPS. (The pier was about 15 m long, which would presume approx 7.5 m accuracy.) I would imagine that newer unites improve on that.

That being said, there are lots of things that can throw them off. The weather, local mountains, even flocks of birds. But, if you know how to read them and take local conditions into account, you can pinpoint yourself quite precisely with the civilian (commercial) versions.

---

Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.

Albert Einstein

You can't dial E.T. on the mobile phone, yet. Even a satellite phone would probably not work for this.

the whole problem with GPS is distance and time. Time is the enemy GPS satellites are in LEO. To get a space elevator to maintain position become about 1000X harder even when onboard computers adjust for time and distance. there is only so much that a computer can guess at before something bad happens.

---

In a rich man's house there is no place to spit but his face.
Diogenes Of Sinope

Is it me or is musicplayer on a different thread but his/her responses are appearing here?

---

Bob DeWoody

My motto: Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow as it may not be required. This no longer applies in light of current events.

If we can't understand music player ,
what chance have we got of decoding an alien signal ?
I'm sure some of our best scientific minds are on the job right now.

john3760

---

What if I possibly started a thread?

Rather as posting a reply at Bob DeWoody (apparently I can not re-post with an empty message, then re-edit the contents without meaning a reply to a poster without pushing the red X), I could answer to john3760 as well saying he is making quite an important point here.

I would be happy trying to de-cipher any message which may possibly have come through. My guess is that this really already has happened.

Musicplayer, I just wonder what any of your posts in this thread have to do with the space elevator which was the topic of discussion.

---

Bob DeWoody

My motto: Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow as it may not be required. This no longer applies in light of current events.

Thanks for the suggestion, Chris.

@ Bob DeWoody: Do you know that you may be partly right.

Sometimes I don't follow the thread.

Why?

First, because I perhaps because I definitely have read most of it. And even so, some people still notice it when something apparently slips through and I don't catch it. It happens at times, unfortunately.

Second, having been here for some time now, I sometimes wonder what I may have exactly got.

Blame a faulty computer perhaps (my previous one - this one does it correct).

If a gaussian becomes perfect (sinusoidal) in shape, what about a signal or message being carried through? Don't you need corresponding pulses (and maybe also spikes and triplets as well) in order to tell whether any information was in a specific task?

In the sound world, we do have waves. Also we are speaking of radio waves.
Still we are only concerned with the pulses and not the gaussians (as well as spikes and triplets), it may seem.

Therefore I am still a bit puzzled when it comes to exactly this.