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silence_kit posted:A Mars colony is costly for what benefit society will gain from it. There are better things the government money can be spent on. There's st least good reason to study Mars' geology and climate. You only really need satellites for the climate part but manned geology missions makes some sense. Finding or not finding life beyond Earth is significant and important and Mars is a good candidate so I'm on board with that. NASA's Moon to Mars plan is somewhat optimized for multiple trips which makes sense in that context. If you want to study the geology of Mars you want to put people in as many different, interesting places as possible rather than just sitting in one place for a long time. Maybe 4-5 missions then shift focus to Enceladus or Titan. That and telescopes are probably where most of the low hanging fruit in terms of scientific discoveries are.
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Aug 12, 2019 21:55
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FFT posted:Is the cable vulnerable to a luddite with a Cessna? What considerations have to be made to ensure that it isn't? Or, like, birds. Though of course, I guess a meter or half-meter wide cable (just throwing out a random guess) isn't all that likely, statistically speaking, to have a bird impact when compared to like a tall building. It's still a potential disruption to wildlife though. Raenir Salazar posted:I just wanna quickly point out that Mars Direct relies on using Mars's atmosphere to assist in slowing down the capsule sent over, so clearly it is non-negligible. It's certainly non-negligible, but one of the issues with Mars lander missions, NASA scientists and engineers have said, is that the very thin atmosphere makes it so that aerobraking and parachutes cannot solely be relied upon for a safe impact. That's why all Mars landers have had some kind of auxiliary landing thrusters to ensure a safe touchdown, or balloons like the Sojourner mission.
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Aug 12, 2019 21:59
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DrSunshine posted:It's certainly non-negligible, but one of the issues with Mars lander missions, NASA scientists and engineers have said, is that the very thin atmosphere makes it so that aerobraking and parachutes cannot solely be relied upon for a safe impact. That's why all Mars landers have had some kind of auxiliary landing thrusters to ensure a safe touchdown, or balloons like the Sojourner mission. Hence why Mars Direct does so by going the "slow" way instead of the "fast" way. I explained this in my big post like 3 pages back. The 180 day trip goes slow enough that it can be relied upon, the way most people assume when discussing Mars is the 90 day way and that deltaV is too fast to use aerobraking.
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Aug 12, 2019 22:06
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FFT posted:Sure. It is also a cable stretching from the bottom to the top of the atmosphere plus plenty more in orbit. With that plus the economic value this endeavor would eventually reap we're talking security considerations that haven't been talked about yet. re, Cessna: Probably not. Nanotubes are pretty strong though that is mainly in "tensile" strength, it isn't clear to me how strong it is from someone trying to crash an airplane into it, but then again people I don't think expect people to crash airplanes into buildings either. Perhaps you could line it with a shielding also made out of nanotubes up part of its length to resist rogue cessnas (Apologies to Something Awful Forum's poster named Cessna). I think there are many sites around the world, including the Three Gorges dam, that have on stand by considerable anti-aircraft defences. The White House is similarly secured against rogue cessna attack, there's AA sites dotting Washington DC. You basically secure it, against any likely threats as best you can according to a cost benefit analysis. I imagine SETC actually isn't likely, I feel like it's more likely that it is leased over to a holding company under UN and international oversight; I don't think it'd work like OPEC at all. A big part of that is partly because the others get probably made in response to the first one to insure certain nations or blocs have that capability. As for jobs I mean, again, it's impossible for the locals to not benefit. I cannot at all fathom how it could happen, there would almost certainly be an underemployment problem; you're talking about a major and unprecedented economic boom happening across the whole country. Because the jobs generated are NOT just the engineers making it, but also people to feed them, places for them to live, the supply chain for local supplies, vehicles, aside from the nanotubes most materials can be found almost anywhere; the construction of facilities would likely use local labour and then people will be needed to maintain and repair them; restaurants, tourist sites, highways, aeroports, sea ports, military bases; the amount of transformative construction that would go on would have so many knock on stimulus effects it's impossible to adequately describe in words just how impossible it is for the locals to not benefit.
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Aug 12, 2019 22:19
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Unoriginal Name posted:So uh if no one has made the argument that compelling scientific research can be done on Mars, what's the argument for doing it again? Payoff: Building infrastructure to utilize the resources in space would probably be good. We could get resources that would benefit everyone... But we don't really have the ability to tap into those things for a reasonable cost, because getting tiny (on an industrial scale) bits of stuff into space using chemical rockets is really expensive and complicated and intimidating. So it'll take a big investment to start utilizing space-based resources, without any short-term return. Hopefully with the right investments, space technology can get to the point of being self-sustaining (or close enough, like the ISS), and then it can grow in scope and complexity without a continuous hose of massive amounts of dollars and Earth-based resources. At which point it's actually useful to extract those resources, instead of just a scientific curiosity. Mars is just an arbitrary place to start this process, with some advantages and disadvantages compared to other choices. Building a colony that could get by with one resupply mission a year (and sending them every six months for redundancy), and with the ability to expand itself and expand its industrial/agricultural base using in-situ resources, and it wouldn't take very long before it was a real colony instead of a research base. Likewise for the Moon, or an arbitrary asteroid, or Venus, or anywhere else we could build a space habitat capable of surviving local conditions, and hopefully these new places are chosen strategically, based on how they increase our ability to use the resources of space.
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Aug 12, 2019 22:25
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Now I'm kind of curious about whether KSR's conjecture about the energy released by a falling space elevator is accurate or not. Would the impact really release as much energy as a nuke? Height of space elevator: 17,032,000 m Density of carbon nanotubes: 1300 kg/m^3 Assuming the space elevator is 1 m in diameter, the total volume would be 2.67 x 10^7 m^3, so the mass of the cable would be around 20579 kg. I'm going to make things easier for myself by assuming it doesn't wrap around the planet and just falls straight down like a big floppy snake. Gravitational constant of Mars: 3.8 m/s^2 W = F*d = m*g*d = (20579 kg)(3.8 m/s^2)(1.7E7m) = 1.33 E 12 J Now this is just assuming the elevator is a point mass, which it isn't, and not factoring in air resistance imparted on the cable as it falls and wraps on the planet, but it'll give us a pretty rough estimate of the order of magnitude at least. Now, according to this: http://discovermagazine.com/2010/jul-aug/24-numbers-nuclear-weapons-bomb-stockpile-peace , the estimate on how many joules released from the Hiroshima bomb was around 6.3E13 J. So even with our abstract falling point mass in vacuum, the amount of kinetic energy released by the mass of the cable falling is less, by an order of magnitude, than the energy released by a small atomic bomb -- just around the order of magnitude of the detonation of a kiloton of TNT, or the amount of fuel in a fully-loaded Boeing 747. I wonder what was the calculation that Kim Stanley Robinson did for his falling space elevator?
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Aug 12, 2019 22:36
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DrSunshine posted:I wonder what was the calculation that Kim Stanley Robinson did for his falling space elevator? The cable's going to trail rather than be directly overhead to begin with (this image from Wikipedia has a clarification that the angles here are exaggerated for detail):  So whatever calculations KSR did, perhaps adding rotational velocity added quite a bit more kinetic energy compared to a vertical fall.
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Aug 12, 2019 22:50
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Infinite Karma posted:Mars is just an arbitrary place to start this process, with some advantages and disadvantages compared to other choices. Building a colony that could get by with one resupply mission a year (and sending them every six months for redundancy), and with the ability to expand itself and expand its industrial/agricultural base using in-situ resources, and it wouldn't take very long before it was a real colony instead of a research base. Likewise for the Moon, or an arbitrary asteroid, or Venus, or anywhere else we could build a space habitat capable of surviving local conditions, and hopefully these new places are chosen strategically, based on how they increase our ability to use the resources of space. Quick conjecture that the once per year resupply mission assumes a *specific* "Fast" Approach; if you are willing to hoof it the slow way I do not believe there is any limit to how many resupplies a year. You can space them out so that one arrives a month.
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Aug 12, 2019 22:56
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DrSunshine posted:Now I'm kind of curious about whether KSR's conjecture about the energy released by a falling space elevator is accurate or not. Would the impact really release as much energy as a nuke? KSR posted:35,000 km long and 10 meters thick
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Aug 12, 2019 22:58
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Tighclops posted:There is a cool scene in one of the older Halo games where an orbital tether that's been severely damaged finally breaks and you see the structure just yank into the sky dropping huge chunks of debris everywhere the gbs osha thread closes forever, for it has witnessed perfection
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Aug 12, 2019 23:00
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Raenir Salazar posted:there's AA sites dotting Washington DC. I didn't believe this but some quick Google search shows just how true it is. How did it feel to be well within collateral damage range of the most powerful weapons in the world lol
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Aug 12, 2019 23:06
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Raenir Salazar posted:Quick conjecture that the once per year resupply mission assumes a *specific* "Fast" Approach; if you are willing to hoof it the slow way I do not believe there is any limit to how many resupplies a year. You can space them out so that one arrives a month. There might not be a physical limit but if it costs a lot of money to send supplies, and you don't need them monthly because 20 tons (or however much gets sent) is enough to keep them topped off, why send more? You could also launch multiple rockets at once if you don't care how much a launch costs and just want more stuff in space. FFT posted:The cable's going to trail rather than be directly overhead to begin with (this image from Wikipedia has a clarification that the angles here are exaggerated for detail):
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Aug 12, 2019 23:08
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Infinite Karma posted:There might not be a physical limit but if it costs a lot of money to send supplies, and you don't need them monthly because 20 tons (or however much gets sent) is enough to keep them topped off, why send more? You could also launch multiple rockets at once if you don't care how much a launch costs and just want more stuff in space. Wait, I got my figure from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_nanotube#Density which gives 1.3 g/cm^3, or, according to WolframAlpha, 1300 kg/m^3. I accept your point about the calculation being far more complex than just a straight-falling point mass, and absolutely said as much multiple times. You definitely do have to factor in all those specifics, especially about the final velocity at the 'tip' of the cable. EDIT: Hmm. The tip of the cable would be moving at orbital velocities, but wouldn't it slow down because it's being dragged by the rest of the cable? There's two factors at work here - the falling force from gravity, and the linear tug from the rest of the cable pulling away as the planet turns. Hmmm... DrSunshine fucked around with this message at 23:21 on Aug 12, 2019 |
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Aug 12, 2019 23:15
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Sjs00 posted:I didn't believe this but some quick Google search shows just how true it is. How did it feel to be well within collateral damage range of the most powerful weapons in the world lol They're not really. An anti-aircraft missile isn't really all that powerful; the "big" ones are big for the range/speed; but the point is to explode a relatively small explosion to damage the skin of an aircraft which doesn't need much damage to knock it out. Infinite Karma posted:There might not be a physical limit but if it costs a lot of money to send supplies, and you don't need them monthly because 20 tons (or however much gets sent) is enough to keep them topped off, why send more? You could also launch multiple rockets at once if you don't care how much a launch costs and just want more stuff in space. I mean, the point was to illustration what you could do. I'm not a NASA administrator and I don't know if a trip a month would be ideal or not, but a trip is approx. 60 million dollars. So it depends what we're sending. Once a month or more I think can make sense if its a massive build up maybe? But for sending the initial crews I'm just saying you could do it that way if you needed to. Infinite Karma posted:Also the V0 from the orbital velocity at the top of the tether is substantial, and it looks like that calculation on DrSunshine's part is off by a factor of 1000 kg (1300 kg/m^3 vs 1300 g/m^3). Cracking a whip isn't the same thing as just calculating a point mass, it's a super complex equation that concentrates the energy at the tip through conservation of momentum. If air resistance doesn't massively slow down the falling object (which is conceivably could based on its volume and low density), or it were falling in a vacuum, it would impart a shitload of energy where it impacted. After some quick googling, but just a quick point; the whole cable wouldn't fall down. Depending on where it snapped obviously a huge amount of it will just stay floating in space, because it's already in geosynchronous orbit. So it would be just be the bit that snapped to calculate. Additionally most of the cable as it fell through the atmosphere would likely just burn up. So again with air resistance, I think it's highly likely it doesn't impact much energy at all.
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Aug 12, 2019 23:24
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Raenir Salazar posted:After some quick googling, but just a quick point; the whole cable wouldn't fall down. Depending on where it snapped obviously a huge amount of it will just stay floating in space, because it's already in geosynchronous orbit. So it would be just be the bit that snapped to calculate. In the KSR context, the cable is demolished at its connection to its satellite, so it's the whole of it that's getting whipped onto the surface.
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Aug 12, 2019 23:27
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Found a site with some simulations of its effect. Wow! This is actually extremely interesting. http://gassend.net/spaceelevator/breaks/index.html 
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Aug 12, 2019 23:30
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DrSunshine posted:Wait, I got my figure from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_nanotube#Density which gives 1.3 g/cm^3, or, according to WolframAlpha, 1300 kg/m^3. I accept your point about the calculation being far more complex than just a straight-falling point mass, and absolutely said as much multiple times. You definitely do have to factor in all those specifics, especially about the final velocity at the 'tip' of the cable. As the lower parts of the cable start to fall, they deform the cable and transfer that downward momentum to the top parts of the cable in a wave. Since it's already moving at orbital velocity at the top, that velocity is enough to fall "ahead" of the rest of the cable, eastward. The downward momentum translates to both increased eastward and increased downward speed, and gravity continues to apply to the parts of the cable that haven't reached the ground yet, further increasing its speed, on top of the transferred momentum from the wave. It'd end up with a bulge most of the way towards the end which is furthest forward, and the very tip trailing behind it, and when that bulge hits the ground, the very tip "cracks" with a lot of force all at once. Basically, the dragging doesn't slow down the tip, it speeds it up. Only air resistance and deformation resistance (and a little bit of friction with the ground) really slows it down. Raenir Salazar posted:After some quick googling, but just a quick point; the whole cable wouldn't fall down. Depending on where it snapped obviously a huge amount of it will just stay floating in space, because it's already in geosynchronous orbit. So it would be just be the bit that snapped to calculate. quote:Additionally most of the cable as it fell through the atmosphere would likely just burn up. So again with air resistance, I think it's highly likely it doesn't impact much energy at all. edit: After seeing that gif, I'm kind of surprised at how close the theory is to the simple simulation. Infinite Karma fucked around with this message at 00:42 on Aug 13, 2019 |
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Aug 12, 2019 23:48
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Raenir Salazar posted:Hence why Mars Direct does so by going the "slow" way instead of the "fast" way. I explained this in my big post like 3 pages back. The 180 day trip goes slow enough that it can be relied upon, the way most people assume when discussing Mars is the 90 day way and that deltaV is too fast to use aerobraking. Aerobraking is a maneuver to slow a craft's velocity, and isn't the same as landing on the planet. It's useful for orbital insertion or slowing yourself to a speed where you'll fall out of orbit. It doesn't matter how fast you get to mars, you'll still need something more than atmospheric drag to safely land something big enough for humans. The terminal velocity of an object on Mars is about five times that of Earth's. This means that a space elevator wouldn't be reaching nuclear explosions speeds as it falls, and it also means that Mars direct would use rockets to land in addition to chutes. Anything large enough to land people has to. This is, incidentally, why so many different ways of landing on Mars have been tried, from airbags to the sky crane of the latest rover. It is practice with larger and larger probes to figure out how to do it with a space capsule. The atmosphere on mars is less than 1 percent of Earth's, which puts it in the range of just enough to be a nuisance, but not enough to be that useful. It does make aerobraking easier to do, since you're getting a lot less heat and drag, it becomes more manageable.
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Aug 13, 2019 02:44
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Killer-of-Lawyers posted:Aerobraking is a maneuver to slow a craft's velocity, and isn't the same as landing on the planet. It's useful for orbital insertion or slowing yourself to a speed where you'll fall out of orbit. To my knowledge nothing I said or was referring to excluding rocket assist from equation; it's 6km/s deltaV in the slow approach, but 7.8 in the fast approach. Checking the chapter, the Mars craft would be approaching relative to Mars at only 3km/s which the books claims is slow enough and Mars gravity (in addition to its atmosphere) is strong enough that this is enough for orbit capture (You would use aerobraking to skip along to enter a stable orbit if the weather is poo poo or just straight ignore that and just land straight up if all is green). I think you misunderstood my response which was responding to Sunshine.
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Aug 13, 2019 03:04
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Yeah, orbit capture is perfectly doable with aerobraking. We've actually done it more on Mars than any other planet, I believe. However, you both weren't talking about orbital capture but touching down, which is different than orbital capture. You said it's not negligible, and he said that it's negligible enough that you couldn't land with just atmospheric drag and parachutes. He is correct. Even if you were to just drop with a velocity of zero from some arbitrary height, your landing capsule would end up reaching some unsafe landing speed by the time it hit the ground. On Earth capsules with parachutes have a terminal velocity that is only safe enough to splash down. The Soyuze, which lands on land, has a small rocket motor that kicks on right before it lands to reach a safe speed.
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Aug 13, 2019 03:12
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What kind of science can get done on Mars? How about absolutely all the research we do on Earth science, but on Mars? Seems kinda obvious to be, but I'm not a tendentious contrarian. Anyhoo - space elevator chat: based on the engineering numbers, I'd say it's very very robust to Earth based terrorism. The base is going to be kilometres thick, and resisting tremendous forces. The amount of energy any potential terrorist is going to be able to direct at it is going to be dwarfed by the fault tolerance of the engineering. As others have mentioned, a space elevator is under tension, not compression. If a terrorist group severs the base, they are going to watch the cable float up into the sky. A break at the counterweight is the big worry, because then that leads to the bulk of the column falls rather than rises. That seems it's safely out of reach atm, but the very existence of the space elevator is going to make it accessible. What's the effect of enormous weights of low density material falling from high orbit at orbital velocities? I have no idea. I definitely wouldn't assume it's harmless, even if it hits the ocean. Worst case scenario and you've got mega tsunamis in every ocean. Bug Squash fucked around with this message at 13:50 on Aug 13, 2019 |
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Aug 13, 2019 13:46
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What if Wile E. Coyote attacks it with a hacksaw!?! Did you wise-guy science dudes predict that??!
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Aug 13, 2019 14:04
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DrSunshine posted:What if Wile E. Coyote attacks it with a hacksaw!?! Did you wise-guy science dudes predict that??! You joke, but it is important to figure out methods of attack to prepare for them. Direct attack at the root isn't interesting because that's obvious enough to be accounted for regardless. Wile E. Coyote somehow manages to sling an asteroid at the counterweight, now we're talking about something interesting.
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Aug 13, 2019 14:15
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I was just making light of things.  But it's absolutely true that it's important to consider possible disaster scenarios when building something on that scale. A plausible scenario in my mind is the risk of small pieces of space debris moving at orbital speeds hitting the cable near the juncture point of the counterweight. As opposed to bird impacts in the first couple kilometers of cable, I think there's a reasonable chance of that happening and triggering a cable collapse, especially if we continue to pollute LEO space like we have been.
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Aug 13, 2019 14:20
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FFT posted:You joke, but it is important to figure out methods of attack to prepare for them. After checking a blueprint showing the elevator falling onto the Road Runner, Wile E. Coyote saws off the elevator and just watchs, forlornly, as the whole thing floats peaceful out into space. A moment passes before Road Runner appears next to him, honks twice, and runs off.
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Aug 13, 2019 14:24
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DrSunshine posted:Found a site with some simulations of its effect. Wow! This is actually extremely interesting. What is the actual width of the destruction it'd cause? The equator is extremely sparcely populated and is mostly water. I assume it's not going to like, blow up and make an explosion 50 miles wide or anything. It seems like the city of Macapá is the only place you would have to figure out what exactly would happen if something cut a blast a mile wide. eyeballing it only a few thousand people live within a mile of the actual equator. and not much more until you spread it out to like 30+ miles. Anyone being in any danger ever is serious and you can't brush off potential loss of life, but it seems like the nature of things means you could contain potential threat to something that is reasonable for any potentially dangerous industrial thing. It's not very many people, and just the speed of falling means a lot of advanced warning would be given if it did fall.
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Aug 13, 2019 15:08
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So are those pieces hitting the ocean just splashing down, or are they gigaton impacting? Because there's a world of difference between "lol new floating snake island" and "oops every coastal city is now gone due to global megatsunamis" .
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Aug 13, 2019 15:14
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There isn't enough mass to hit gigatons. Terminal velocity is a thing.
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Aug 13, 2019 15:36
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Killer-of-Lawyers posted:There isn't enough mass to hit gigatons. Terminal velocity is a thing. It's not really just falling, it's being whipped at geosynchronous orbital velocity. So it'd be a big rope slamming into the ground at over 2 miles per second. Which would be something you wouldn't want to stand next to. But it doesn't seem like it's any sort of supernatural bomb that would be wiping out things an hour away on a map or boiling the ocean or anything. And it'd be wrapping at that 2 miles per second, which would suck nearby, but gives the most distant people over 3 hours to move. It seems like a serious problem that would be really dramatic and destructive, but like, not any sort of doomsday thing, and not something that would touch very close to much human settlement and could be something you could mitigate in places it was an issue. .
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Aug 13, 2019 15:51
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Plus the earth gets a fancy new belt.
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Aug 13, 2019 17:41
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I imagine once the smoke clears though, everybody says "let's not try that again."
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Aug 13, 2019 17:52
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Nail Rat posted:I imagine once the smoke clears though, everybody says "let's not try that again." Oh, this is humanity. It would be "let's make 3 more super close to each other for redundancy."
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Aug 13, 2019 17:55
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:It's not really just falling, it's being whipped at geosynchronous orbital velocity. So it'd be a big rope slamming into the ground at over 2 miles per second. Which would be something you wouldn't want to stand next to. But it doesn't seem like it's any sort of supernatural bomb that would be wiping out things an hour away on a map or boiling the ocean or anything. And it'd be wrapping at that 2 miles per second, which would suck nearby, but gives the most distant people over 3 hours to move. It seems like a serious problem that would be really dramatic and destructive, but like, not any sort of doomsday thing, and not something that would touch very close to much human settlement and could be something you could mitigate in places it was an issue. . Do you know what the velocity of geosync is relative to a fixed point on the equator? Don't worry, I can wait. Those animations that were linked are showing what would happen where every frame is 6 minutes and 40 seconds. It also doesn't take into account air friction slowing it down. It's a slower event than you think, it'd take like, hours.
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Aug 13, 2019 17:56
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Killer-of-Lawyers posted:It's a slower event than you think, it'd take like, hours. Yeah? It'd take over 3 hours. moving at 2 miles per second. Which is what the post you quoted said. Because it's not a falling object falling straight down like a minecraft tower with a block removed. It's an orbital object rotating the earth while sinking.
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Aug 13, 2019 18:12
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Yes, but it doesn't crash down as soon as the counterweight is clipped off. The top isn't moving in relation to the ground. This isn't like a satellite screaming into the atmosphere, it's more like loosing tension on a yo yo. It would probably start moving pretty fast as time goes on, but that's only if it's massive with little surface area to catch the wind, otherwise it's going to come crashing down about as fast as anything else that falls out of the sky.
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Aug 13, 2019 18:38
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silence_kit posted:The main posters in this thread have a pretty poor understanding of economics and abstract it away when it doesn't suit them Well, silence_kit, main poster, then I suggest you stop doing that Edit: The discussion on possible disasters with a hypothetical space elevator seems a bit pointless to me. Either that drat thing will be built in a way to avoid all that poo poo (like with that let-it-break-up-and-the-tiny-bits-have-parachutes-idea), or people will be so brazenly dumb there will be a dozen built at the same time, all slightly different and all but 1-2 will fall and crush a huge part of mankind. Arguing it won't be built at all is a bit like looking at aircraft carriers and assuming you're hallucinating because no way in hell would someone build those giant pieces of poo poo. It's human nature to build giant pieces of poo poo! Look at it this way: Boston Dynamics is selling dog robots right now and we have tons of armed drones already. Clearly, neither common sense nor the Terminator-movies taught us anything. We deserve everything we get, even the accidentally awesome parts!
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Aug 13, 2019 18:42
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Screw a Mars colony. Let's just throw kuipers belt objects at that lifeless desert till it grows lakes and an atmosphere. Universe Sandbox 2 tells me itll work and who am I to argue? Also I'm only half joking we should probably think about doing that.
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Aug 13, 2019 19:15
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Nail Rat posted:I imagine once the smoke clears though, everybody says "let's not try that again." Ah yes, much like when the first sky scraper collapsed humans stopped building tall buildings forever.
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Aug 13, 2019 19:46
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Raenir Salazar posted:Ah yes, much like when the first sky scraper collapsed humans stopped building tall buildings forever. I mean we were all so stunned that we spontaneously developed hundreds of new languages.
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Aug 13, 2019 19:51
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Captain Monkey posted:I mean we were all so stunned that we spontaneously developed hundreds of new languages. That was divine punishment by god. Hey, wait a moment! We are so dumb and stubborn, not even divine punishment could stop us from building new tall buildings!
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Aug 13, 2019 20:01
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