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Raenir Salazar posted:
It's not really the same though, you can manipulate the price on mined stuff, but at the end of the day what is there is what is there. If some guy found the cure for cancer and the only ingredient was 300,000 tons of gold then like, he's out of luck, no matter who funds him or how much money he collects there just isn't that much gold around. But like, in space, there is single asteroids with 10,000 quadrillion dollars worth of metal in them. which is a nonsense number which means the scale of resources there is as much platinum as anyone has ever mined or used in all of history thousands of times over. It's not literally infinite gold or nickel but like, it's all the gold you could eat forever and ever per asteroid. It's not an addition to the market, it's taking the market, throwing it away and replacing the whole market with 'we got this asteroid now'. Like it's possible god was infinitely wise and gave us metal on earth exactly in exact proportions to how useful each metal would be to us so we already have all the metals we need at exactly the right scarcity, but that seems real unlikely and I'd like to see what engineers can do with gold that is as cheap as iron (I'd like to see what fashion designers or architects can do with it too for that matter).
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Aug 1, 2019 16:55
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Uh I mean, very broadly speaking I think generally yeah that's how it would work; because, just because there's a massive amount of "stuff" out there, there is still a bottleneck in how much of that resources can actually be fed into the market and that is essentially what determines price. Coal and iron, even sand are commodities traded that are incredibly common but still have some notional price ultimately determined by a combination of speculation markets, transportation costs, extraction costs, and the rate in which it can happen. Like, a large function of the "cost" of a resource is not just its rarity, but the difficulty and cost of extraction. Peak Oil/Resource theory is NOT about us "running out" of a given resources; but the energy-in/energy-out. I'll focus more on the cost aspect than the "surplus energy is needed for complex societies" argument. Basically, the more difficult it is to extract oil or any other resource, the more expensive it becomes when brought to market; and if the market still has access to plentiful crude from Saudi Arabia or Iraq then this resource isn't market viable. The reverse is also true, back when oil was first discovered it was cheap to extract, literally spurting out of the ground in huge gobs, and industrialization accelerated using cheap hydrocarbons; and the price of crude has basically been pretty low until the 70's when OPEC began loving with the supply for political goals and the world had begun to be so used to it and was so reliant on it that it single handed kick started a recession. But as you can already see here, we obviously still have a "vast" amount of oil in reserves, but it doesn't instantly make the price drop just because its there, because it's not extracted and yet commodified. As the cost increases and gets more expensive as cheap and plentiful (and most importantly, cheap to extract) oil depletes; this makes more expensive to extract, more expensive and intensive to refine crude more economically viable; since this is gradual the price fluctuates but the market otherwise is ignoring the actual reserves that exist. For example, suppose Ceres has as much palladium, titanium, unobtainium, we could ever need. Hundreds and hundreds of years worth. Even if the majority of which is close to surface or present in circumstances that allows for "easy" extraction, literally huge veins of it everywhere. You still gotta go to Ceres, dig it all up, put it on a tug, and bring it back, and find a way to bring it to market on Earth. Obviously the economics of this due to hedge funds, brokerages, speculators, stocks, etc, obviously it doesn't literally have to brought physically to Earth for it to have a price and to affect the market; but clearly there is a bottleneck; there is a finite rate of extraction, processing, and refining and fabrication and transportion. If the commodity doesn't have value because it is infinite, then the time and opportunity costs involved in transporting and processing it that will be commodified instead. The market basically, will adapt to the circumstances it is present in. edit: "The price of a good is what the purchaser will pay for it" - Adam Smith. Raenir Salazar fucked around with this message at 19:49 on Aug 1, 2019 |
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Aug 1, 2019 19:46
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On that line of reasoning, it will be interesting to see how it goes when the first entity gets access to one of these effectively infinite taps and how it restructures the market and what kind off incentive/viability it creates for competition. Like, if you go to Ceres and mine there your bottle neck is going to be at Ceres, but if you lasso an asteroid and bring it to NEO or even a Lunar orbit, your bottleneck will be much closer to Earth and you could strategically saturate the market before a Ceres supply makes it back, cratering their potential profit as your supply can be much more responsive to market demands.
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Aug 1, 2019 20:44
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Dameius posted:On that line of reasoning, it will be interesting to see how it goes when the first entity gets access to one of these effectively infinite taps and how it restructures the market and what kind off incentive/viability it creates for competition. Then the Ceres zaibatsu obviously lobbies the UN to ban tugging the asteroid to Earth for safety concerns.  More seriously I expect it to be along those lines, the cost of the goods brought to market might be factored by how expensive it is to tug it. Or, tubbing a whole 5km wide asteroid might not be allowed to within a certain distance for safety concerns; i.e you might have to cut up the roid into smaller bits which can then be brought over. Thinking about it, until a space elevator is up and running what people have to do is attach parachuts to smaller rocks or containers containing processed goods and then aiming it for an ocean which they send a boat to retrieve. Even if you brought a roid to a lagrange point, there are challenges to bringing it down safely that still might serve as a fairly effective bottleneck. Thinking about it logically I think it's probable that there's actually zero benefit to bringing a rock to Earth orbit/L2. Because the process of bringing down "stuff" might be dangerous enough to significantly limit throughpoint that you might as well have not tugged the rock itself. We don't want to accidentily meteor ourselves by pushing something too big; there's pretty big ricks involved. Cannisters with parachuts seems most likely. Maybe you could glide stuff down, but bringing the glider back up may pose a challenge and a lot of stuff might need to be fabricated in orbit to facilitate it. I think shipping iron and other still common resources will have to wait for a space elevator.
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Aug 1, 2019 21:06
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Like everyone says, it barely makes sense to drop asteroid mined materials from orbit down to Earth, unless you're sending something insanely valuable like palladium or platinum. If you are mining for iron and nickel and structural metals, the asteroid miners are going to keep their raw materials in space to build (or 3d print) more stuff in space, at a much cheaper cost than sending raw materials from the Earth's surface.
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Aug 1, 2019 21:21
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Waste heat would be a bitch if you did smelting in space.
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Aug 1, 2019 21:26
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Moridin920 posted:Waste heat would be a bitch if you did smelting in space. Yeah I've been wondering how they could be able to manage waste heat in something that doesn't have atmosphere.
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Aug 1, 2019 21:42
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I don't think we could feasibly do smelting with current technology. Construction would probably be fine. If we were going to do something like that it might make more sense to drop stuff into Mars orbit. The gravity well is about a third as strong as Earth's (iirc) and less danger of "oops I accidentally meteor'd human civilization." I want to say it'd be easier to do a space elevator there too. Could move Phobos into geostationary orbit and use it for the tether. Probably would require a fuckton of fuel to do though. Moridin920 fucked around with this message at 21:57 on Aug 1, 2019 |
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Aug 1, 2019 21:51
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Bring it into the atmosphere just wrong and it'll smelt itself.
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Aug 1, 2019 21:58
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There is no actual magical space metals or element X, but there is a ton of things that really just do not exist in large quantities on earth. All the platinum ever mined in history would make a cube less than 7 and a half meters wide. All the palladium would be a cube less than half that. All the rhodium would be a cube less than half that again. There just is not much of certain materials. If you are talking about disrupting the nickel market with asteroid metal then you are pulling down huge rocks over and over, but there is a lot of stuff that just does not exist in meaningful quantities on the planet earth. Like I am unclear why anyone would need any platinum-190, I don't think there is any known special properties to it and it's not radioactive or anything, but if anyone figured out a good reason to need it they are out of luck since it occurs at only occurs at 1 part per trillion in the earths crust and the only way to get any is melt down huge amounts of platinum and extract the 0.014% of naturally occuring platinum that is platinum-190. Like who knows what the uses would be, it's like aluminum, no one used it for anything but looking pretty until we figured out how to get tons of it then we suddenly had all sorts of things we needed it for. But there is a lot of stuff that even small amounts of it would be the entire world supply many times over. It's why asteroids have goofy estimates of value like 10,000 quadrillion dollars. It's not just a large amount of things, it's amounts of things on scales that don't even exist on earth.
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Aug 1, 2019 22:07
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Dameius posted:Yeah I've been wondering how they could be able to manage waste heat in something that doesn't have atmosphere. http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/thermo/cootime.html Plugging in some numbers, I ended up with this: 300 tons of Al2O3 ceramic heat sink in a sphere (probably the worst shape) would cool from 2500K (enough to smelt Iron) to room temperature in less than a week. Assuming some kind of heat exchanger technology could cool the metal and transfer into a heat sink, that would probably be able to do 200 tons of metal, based on the density differences.
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Aug 1, 2019 22:12
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quote:300 tons of Al2O3 ceramic heat sink in a sphere (probably the worst shape) would cool from 2500K (enough to smelt Iron) to room temperature in less than a week. You have to account for incoming radiation from the Sun, also. Infinite Karma posted:Assuming some kind of heat exchanger technology could cool the metal and transfer into a heat sink Well yeah but that's kind of the rub though. Moridin920 fucked around with this message at 22:28 on Aug 1, 2019 |
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Aug 1, 2019 22:24
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Moridin920 posted:You have to account for incoming radiation from the Sun, also. Mirrors to reflect the sun's rays away. Maybe some kind of heat sink they eject into cooling storage; maybe massive massive massive structures to radiate the heat out. Infinite Karma posted:Like everyone says, it barely makes sense to drop asteroid mined materials from orbit down to Earth, unless you're sending something insanely valuable like palladium or platinum. Uh actually no, there is ONE big reason why you'd want to drop asteroid mined materials to Earth, without it being super valuable. If you wanted to basically no longer have to do any ecological damage that strip mining entails. I think that's a pretty solid long term goal is outsourcing basically all industry to space.
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Aug 1, 2019 22:34
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Raenir Salazar posted:Mirrors to reflect the sun's rays away. Maybe some kind of heat sink they eject into cooling storage; maybe massive massive massive structures to radiate the heat out. Yeah it could probably be done but you'd need some massive radiator arrays.
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Aug 1, 2019 22:35
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Moridin920 posted:Well yeah but that's kind of the rub though. The only real way to then dispel the heat from the heat sinks is via radiation which is kind of slow. You need to account for incoming heat from the Sun, also. note: I don't know how to calculate the radiation flux from the sun offsetting the cooling without doing more research, or how to actually calculate how much radiation gets reabsorbed by the cooling elements with line of sight to each other. But even if it was an order of magnitude less efficient, one smelter could make hundreds of thousands of tons in space, cooled using blackbody radiation.
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Aug 1, 2019 22:40
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In general the idea of outsourcing all our industry to space seems awesome. Couple space elevators to bring finished goods down and we all live in 3001 style arcologies and most of the planet can revert back to nature. Seems like a good answer to people who go "ahh why space we can't even fix our poo poo down here."
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Aug 1, 2019 22:57
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Even if something cooled slowly what would it matter? Unless it was many many years you could just push things out of the smelter at some low speed and the molten blob would happily float in whatever direction you pushed it slowly cooling for however many hours/days/months you needed. It's not like it'd wander off or get lost or anything on the way.
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Aug 1, 2019 23:13
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Moridin920 posted:In general the idea of outsourcing all our industry to space seems awesome. Couple space elevators to bring finished goods down and we all live in 3001 style arcologies and most of the planet can revert back to nature. Space elevators to bring stuff down sounds like a really expensive, possibly impossible thing to do something that is probably the easiest part of all this.
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Aug 2, 2019 08:18
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Killer-of-Lawyers posted:Space elevators to bring stuff down sounds like a really expensive, possibly impossible thing to do something that is probably the easiest part of all this. Cheaper/sooner than you think imo
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Aug 2, 2019 08:28
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We ain't getting a space elevator any time soon, getting bulk down from orbit is going to require some careful thinking. In the short term the system is probably going to require sending up payloads of nothing but parachutes to bring material down. That's going to eat into profit margins. Medium term, I think wen can expect to be manufacturing the parachutes out of the material in orbit. Metal woven parachutes are obviously not as efficient as current fabric ones, but the raw material will be right there in enormous amounts, and can melted down afterwards. It's a big lump of metal so it doesn't even need to be a particularly soft landing.
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Aug 2, 2019 08:36
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dex_sda posted:A pseudo-force is something that is a force which is a consequence of being in a non-inertial frame of reference, in classical theory. In other words, there is nothing mediating the force (such as in electromagnetic force or weak and strong interactions). Ah, right, centrifugal force. A thing that doesn't exist and yet can be demonstrated with a yo-yo. Man, it's been a while since I failed to complete my physics minor. I should go review on Hyperphysics. dex_sda posted:In General Relativity, gravity is a consequence of the curvature of spacetime. All particles move in straight lines if not acted on by an external force. But, because spacetime is curved in the presence of mass, the geodesic (a straight line in non-flat spacetime) appears bent. That is gravity. It can be described as a force, but that description is always a consequence of the frame it's in. In a covariant (frame independent) sense, there is nothing there. Hence, pseudo-force. So from here I guess my question is; GR predicted gravitational waves, we've proven they exist now. So we know what carries gravitational energy; how does that manage to look like nothing in the covariant sense? Would we not see contractions and relaxations of space-time? Or is it in the weeds of the math that gravitational waves aren't just too weak to see normally but are unnecessary and instead a by product of especially gravitationally violent events? And yeah, at this point either general relativity is incomplete, or quantum physics is incomplete. The latter would I guess be easier to add something to, but who loving knows. Relevant to this topic, managing to build a particle accelerator in orbit that would be infeasibly large on Earth may give us more insight. Or at least let us again prove what dark matter isn't. dex_sda posted:I use pleasing in place of elegant. Math in GR is certainly complex enough that working with it is a challenge, but that doesn't mean in that framework some things aren't more elegant than others. Which would be the argument for quantum gravity requiring quantum physics to change rather than GR. Though that's difficult to do if gravity truly has no particle other than for the same reason you can use the same equations to calculate the wavelength of a baseball. dex_sda posted:Bolded part is exactly why TeVeS is a failure. It takes an old theory, and instead of doing something intricate, it makes everything in that old theory (that has not so far had anything show it is incorrect) messy and difficult. If TeVeS turned out correct tomorrow (it won't), we will have learned basically nothing about the universe. We'd still need dark matter for other considerations, and we'd be exactly zero steps closer to a theory unifying gravitation with other forces. Now that I can understand. dex_sda posted:Strings are actually the concept of mathematical beauty taken to extremes. M-theory is largely a thing because it's super pretty and it makes GR fall out by itself from it. It just also kinda makes every other possible mathematical structure fall out of it, so it's really weird as a theory. Strings are freaking hilarious and I enjoy reading about anything involving them. Without trying to understand the math too deeply because I'm unwilling to put that effort in until there's a breakthrough that confirms them. dex_sda posted:Don't worry, there are aplenty mathematicians/physicists who don't care and enjoy making calculations harder and harder instead of prettier. Experimentalists largely don't care, and were the Higgs not found, they'd use the LHC to search in other places - they wouldn't just raise their hands and go 'welp, thats hundreds of millions down the drain, we got nothin.' I only wish chemistry had need for experiments on the ridiculous scale particle physics has gotten to these days. But nooooooo, it's all relatively cheap supercomputer clusters now and the same wet labs but now with robots to help confirm whatever gets theorized on those supercomputers. Though actually the big rear end experiments that chemists need to undertake are basically doing all of the chemistry we know, but in space, on Mars, or wherever. Anywhere that isn't Earth with unchangeable Earth conditions like gravity and a magnetosphere. And then the chemists can throw up their hands and go 'Welp, that's hundreds of millions down the drain, turns out we were right and gravity doesn't do anything at the molecular level.' Or maybe we'll learn something important. dex_sda posted:You're approaching it from the wrong direction. Matter having chemistry is actually the weird thing. If you made parameters randomly, you'd expect there to be no chemistry at all. And there's no chemistry of neutrinos, which are basically DM but of a very low mass, so we already have things in our own universe that we can measure that are weird. I'm approaching it from the only direction I know! Exotic chemistry existing would be fun, but yeah, it looks like the chemistry we know is the weird thing already. Maybe strange matter has chemistry somehow, that's still out there somewhere. Probably. I read the Wikipedia article on the Penrose Interpretation. I'm sold if only because it sounds like it explains spooky action at a distance and other ridiculous implications of quantum mechanics in a less easily mocked way. Do you have any book recommendations on the Penrose Intpretation? dex_sda posted:I meant it has a higher gravity than the Moon. That makes sense and this what I get for skimming the space chat and assuming the Earth was the reference point for everything. 
LtStorm fucked around with this message at 16:37 on Aug 2, 2019 |
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Aug 2, 2019 09:12
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This thread is a pretty interesting mishmash of ideas and concepts, and disregarding the "humanity must perish" posts you are talking about topics I love. My personal take on the Fermi paradox is that we are probably rare, we are probably early and we are probably very far away from other intelligent life both by distance and by time (it would be an amazing coincidence if intelligent life evolved both close to us and was still active in our extremely small window of searching). Regarding the feasibility of asteroid mining, I generally agree with it being a prerequisite for colonizing the solar system, and a foundry in a close lagrange point the most realistic starting point for O'Neill cylinder construction. It'd probably be (and require) a tech boom in biotech, automation and would necessitate a lot of engineering of methods to utilize/negate vacuum welding, but I haven't read anyone that says it's physically impossible. I figure that's the first likely moneymaker, so that's where we'd start. Not a lot of people have been discussing launch loops, and I've always been under the impression that they would be a lot more technologically feasible than a space elevator. How about that? Would it still be needed after ol musky manages to get launch cost per kg down to a tenth of the regular?
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Aug 2, 2019 09:31
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Raenir Salazar posted:Instead of war, let us use conflict, which could be more easily be understood to exist along a continuum with shooting and explosions on one end, hacking and cyber infiltration towards the other end and angry letters and bluster past that. China is quickly overcoming the USA as the economic power on the terresteial earth. They wont build a stronger earth army. But even then they have no problem stealing intelectual property and nothing is done about it But in space where they USA doesnt have a 70 year spending head start they will dominate. And they will 100% hold nothing back in their fuckery. Just like how theyre building islands in the pacific. Theyre going to crush the competition in space in fair and unfair methods
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Aug 2, 2019 11:50
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thewalk posted:China is quickly overcoming the USA as the economic power on the terresteial earth. They wont build a stronger earth army. But even then they have no problem stealing intelectual property and nothing is done about it This isn't an unusual occurrence and is well accounted for in my post, maybe not that one specifically but the other one where I discuss the concept of "prime real estate" as a function of ease of travel. Regardless of how you view the US or China, both are basically equally bad as good faith international actors go, and equally good. As a result, both will do some "chicanery" but probably not to an extent as large as we think. But something analogous to what already occurs and designed to not escalate tensions. Basically if you want to insist the US/China will do "fuckery" you're going to have to describe what it entails beyond "vague" assertions you totally believe in as 100% likely to happen but also lack the clarity or knowledge to describe how it would happen? Hrm, awfully convenient. To copy a certain Something Awful forums poster: -Will they sabotage each others launches? No. -Will they directly sabotage each other L2 foundries? No. -Would they try to steal each other's space rocks? I don't find this likely. -Might they "play with" beacons on yet unmined space rocks? I could see this happening. -Might they "buzz" each others mining operations? I.e sending armed space craft close to another's space mining operations to test readiness like they do today? I could see this happening. -Would they try to steal technical data and IP? Yes. -Will they be litigious fucks in the WTO or space management board the UN sets up? Yes. -Will they work together to try to muscle the Europeans or Canada out from also mining space rocks? Maybe, but I think it's less likely. Basically Antarctica and existing space treaties I think give a decent precedent that there's also plenty of room of mutual interest and cooperation. Like search and rescue for manned operations, sharing of telemetric data, so I think it hardly guaranteed or certain that could could result in additional avenues of antagonism. For example Isaac Asimov gave a fairly lengthy letter to President Carter about how space could be used to open new avenues of cooperation and integration and I think the arguments laid out were fairly compelling (Which is oddly apparently not available online). Basically I think there will be tensions and consternation regarding how claims are sorted out, especially if China and the US try to claim desirable, easily accessible locations in the belt that forces late comers to go further afield. But this is hardly certain. Ideally the US, China, and the UN make the determination that it is in their mutual interest to sort things out.
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Aug 2, 2019 15:13
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Moridin920 posted:Cheaper/sooner than you think imo I'm not going to hold my breath on the material science part being solved any time soon, let alone cheaper than I think. I'd put my money on a launch loop or some other launch system getting built well before someone manages to run a line up to Geosync.
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Aug 2, 2019 17:31
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China appears to have developed a material with a strength of 80 gigapascals. For reference, NASA estimates around 7 gigapascals is needed for it to be practical. And theoretically carbon nanotubes can go up to 300 according to that article, when back in 2000 63gp was about the limit. I think we can reliably know that a space elevator is possible and coming; it just depends on the industrial sciences to get to the point that the materials can be mass produced at enough of a rate for such an elevator plus all the other applications it has. Basically, the material is not only thought to theoretically exist, but examples of it exist in laboratories. Producing it and testing it to rigorous standards of QA controls is the important part of that. While a launch loop is a big ???
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Aug 2, 2019 17:59
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All I know is both Japan and China are aiming to start construction of an elevator by the 40s/50s and meanwhile in the USA we're... idk really. Jerking off. Japan is running an experiment on the ISS right now (maybe it's done by now) involving cable motion in space between two cubesats and how a climber would work. But yeah afaik the major bottleneck is not the existence of the materials but rather making them in sufficient quantities for construction to be viable. Moridin920 fucked around with this message at 18:24 on Aug 2, 2019 |
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Aug 2, 2019 18:21
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America has basically abandoned its desire to remain the world's sole superpower. I went and read up more on hyperloops, I'm a little unclear if they require superconductors, or if they are currently feasible with current technology and materials. I'm also unclear if they need to be in a straight line.
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Aug 2, 2019 18:24
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Launch loops are probably viable too, there's some engineering obstacles but nothing insurmountable I think. It's mostly just a question of who is going to fork over the estimated $10-$50 billion + time needed to build one. e: Also I think a launch loop would have to be around 2000 km long if I remember right and needs to probably be over the ocean so there'd be some international treaty concerns to work out I'm sure. Again, not insurmountable. Moridin920 fucked around with this message at 18:29 on Aug 2, 2019 |
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Aug 2, 2019 18:26
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Moridin920 posted:Launch loops are probably viable too, there's some engineering obstacles but nothing insurmountable I think. But Moridin, who would want to go to Space? Don't you know space is completely inhospitable and would never make a profit? edit: Hah! Edit 2: It's 2,000 km long for 3g acceleration (tolerable for humans), longer if you want it to be something people can get up and walk around like a flight or a train ticket. It can be 1,000km and below if you're okay going back to rocket launch g's (probably good for goods and materials). I'm not sure though if loops help with the issue of getting stuff back down from space though. Maybe glide a shuttle to line up with the loop and get caught by it? I dunno. Raenir Salazar fucked around with this message at 18:31 on Aug 2, 2019 |
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Aug 2, 2019 18:29
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It makes me mad sometimes to think about what we could accomplish collectively as a species but instead we dedicate ourselves to making number go up.
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Aug 2, 2019 18:30
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Moridin920 posted:It makes me mad sometimes to think about what we could accomplish collectively as a species but instead we dedicate ourselves to making number go up. Be thankful the moment China starts to get ahead there the US will move loving heaven and earth to catch up and leap frog over out of spite if it hasn't collapsed yet. Also I added an edit to my post about the length of loops. They can be shorter but at higher g acceleration.
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Aug 2, 2019 18:33
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Raenir Salazar posted:Be thankful the moment China starts to get ahead there the US will move loving heaven and earth to catch up and leap frog over out of spite if it hasn't collapsed yet. Yeah pretty much. All it's going to take is China landing rovers on Mars for the jingoists to start freaking out about the thought of Americans not being the first people to land on another planet. But it's true that America has basically stopped being able to think big, because any projects that take more than four years are at significant risk of being financially gutted. And that's without considering the fact that the ruling party abhors any governmental project that isn't expressly military in nature. At a certain point the US will find itself in a position where no amount of crash funding will allow itself to catch up to countries that have been investing in their future.
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Aug 2, 2019 18:39
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exactly when did d&d posters become so drat nationalistic If other countries want to waste their resources on the boondoggle that is space, I say let em. And if they "win" in space, so what?
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Aug 2, 2019 21:16
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Moridin920 posted:Launch loops are probably viable too, there's some engineering obstacles but nothing insurmountable I think. Also an interesting political challenge considering that an oopsy may result in a large mass departing controlled flight at speeds somewhere between "extreme" and "ludicrous."
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Aug 2, 2019 21:51
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I didn't say it was trivial, I said the problems aren't insurmountable from an engineering/science point of view. Moridin920 fucked around with this message at 21:57 on Aug 2, 2019 |
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Aug 2, 2019 21:52
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Kerning Chameleon posted:exactly when did d&d posters become so drat nationalistic If nationalists are being loud and shouty we might as well co-opt their idiocy to accomplish something useful
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Aug 2, 2019 22:06
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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Raenir Salazar posted:China appears to have developed a material with a strength of 80 gigapascals. For reference, NASA estimates around 7 gigapascals is needed for it to be practical. And theoretically carbon nanotubes can go up to 300 according to that article, when back in 2000 63gp was about the limit.
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Aug 2, 2019 22:08
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MIT has made similar breakthroughs iirc. I think they recently developed a material that is 10x stronger than steel and 1/20th as dense. E: it looks like in that article, China has just made improved strength carbon nanofiber tubes which isn't really unthinkable. The issue with carbon nanofiber tubes has always just been production in sufficient quantity. Idk again it's not impossible from a physics standpoint (like FTL is), we could do it if the proper motivation and funding was behind it. Obviously a mega-engineering structure into space is not trivial regardless. Moridin920 fucked around with this message at 22:17 on Aug 2, 2019 |
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Aug 2, 2019 22:10
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Rent-A-Cop posted:Building a 2000km long, 20km tall structure in the middle of the ocean is a non-trivial technical challenge. It's a big project, bigger than anyone has ever built. But stuff tends to draw it wrong, like it would be a big solid tower, where the idea is more like a set of garden hoses with a loop of bike chain through it made of mundane materials under non-supernaturally high stresses, because of the way momentum works in a big long moving chain. Like again, it's a bigger project than anyone has ever built and would need a nuclear power plant just to run it, but it's not really a big giant 2000km tower than is 80km tall, it's more like, a big long hose that has stuff shooting through it that makes it bow upwards then you can walk up it or glue some magnets to it and drive a train up it or whatever. .
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Aug 2, 2019 22:56
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