But when you consider the cost of building the Trans Pacific Bridge compared to an equivalent number of mega-container ships, it starts to look a lot less appealing.
I think he means that assuming cost weren’t an issue (a huge “if”), such an engineering feat wouldn’t require materials that haven’t been invented yet.
The red tide? Yep, that is a huge pain in the butt, sure enough.
Here’s a nice Wiki article on the Bering strait bridge proposal. It’s across the Pacific, just a hair’s breadth below the border between the North Pacific and the Arctic oceans.
Sure enough. Abnormal sea color makes me twitchy. A bigger threat to such a bridge keeping sustained operation is rogue waves however.
Not sure if this is serious, but we definitely can’t build an arch that big, for the same reason that we can’t build a 10-mile-high skyscraper. We don’t have any materials to build it out of that wouldn’t get crushed under their own weight.
<scratching arch bridge over the Pacific off todo list>
This is a vital difference.
One question is if sufficient raw materials, engineering knowledge, and manpower exist that would allow humanity to complete the project assuming that a sufficiently high number of people, raw materials, equipment, land, and money that actually exist are diverted to such an activity and the proper permits can be obtained. Sure, it might require that new, heretofore never before built construction equipment like super tall cranes or floating concrete factories be built, but that’s ok as long as we can build the cranes and other stuff. If we have to recurse (e.g. build A, then use A to build B, then use B to build C, then use C to build a trans-Pacific bridge, it’s ok as long as the plan would actually work).
The second question includes everything in the first question but also requires that sufficient resources (manpower, raw materials, land, equipment, money, etc.) are actually available or can reasonably be made available in a reasonable timeframe and that the necessary permits can actually be obtained in a reasonable amount of time (say, several years assuming that governments want detailed engineering plans, simulations, and 10 round reviews by the top minds from around the globe and that the conditions can actually be met).
And who do you expect would fund it? Should we give it over to private companies and let them pay for it and then charge tolls? Welcome to the Microsoft Trans-Pacific Bridge. Pay $5,000 toll please.
Not currently, but it might be possible to build both a 10km+ skyscraper and a transpacific arch in the distant future, using actively supported materials; the ‘launch loop’ concept could be used for the bridge,
and the ‘space fountain’ concept could be used for the skyscraper.
In fact, if we had the technology to manufacture unlimited amounts of pure diamond, we could build a skyscraper higher than 10km without active support. But none of this counts as currently available engineering technology, so it doesn’t really answer the question in the original post.
Perhaps a floating but detachable and even submersible bridge could work, this way when rought seas happen that section can break away for a bit to reattach later.
Check with the Washington Department of Highways (or maybe it’s Department of Transportation nowadays). They’ve build several submersible bridges withing the past few decades. Not intentionally, but oh well…
Regarding a bridge across the Pacific, it would depend on how much nonavailium you had available. With plenty of balognaium rivets.
Jeez, guys, I think faster than light travel might come sooner. And cheaper.
It is one idea but you just upped the cost by a factor of 100 or more. The key point people see to be missing is that a bridge is only a bridge if it stays 100% intact and sustainable throughout its entire length.
Detachable bridges wouldn’t solve the problem of having a workable bridge. The whole thing is a failure once any section breaks off and I am not sure there is any benefit to doing that in the first place. You would need to build the structure so that there is 99.9999% chance that would never happen on any section of it and that is impossible given the constraints.
Submersible bridges are a cool idea but completely unworkable even if you have unlimited money and time. Remember, there will be people and goods crossing it when that earthquake or rogue waves hits. You can’t just have the bridge do a duck and cover maneuver to save itself while drowning and destroying everything crossing it.
We can’t completely predict either undersea earthquakes or rogue waves so that is one reason I say it is impossible. This is a weird thought problem because it will probably never be possible at all even though superficially harder sounding problems will.
[ol]
[li]Toll bridge? How much?[/li][li]Pedestrian walkway?[/li][li]Proposed name: Terrorist Magnet Bridge[/li][/ol]
Rogue waves wouldn’t be an issue. I mean, you could build the deck 100 meters above sea level. There are plenty of bridges that high, or higher. You’d need whole nations of people to inspect, maintain and repair the thing. But there are whole nations of unemployed right now. So manpower’s not an issue either.
Yeah…that’s what stopping this project. Manpower.
Not to mention that for every vertical pylon you would need to build (and you would need thousands), you could build maybe two Maersk Triple E class container ships.
There are floating oil platforms. So presumably we could build a series of structures like those, moor them to the ocean floor, and stretch a roadway between them.
Someone’s going to walk to Asia?
Although if one end is here in Oregon, you’ll have to include a bike lane. It’s pretty much required for any Oregon bridges…
Terrorists wouldn’t need a pedestrian walkway. Boats would do just fine.
I have an idea to make a floating pontoon bridge work:
Instead of linking them all together and dealing with the hassle of trying to drive from one pontoon to the other as waves keep shifting their position relative to each other, we drive a whole bunch of cars onto the first pontoon, then, drive the pontoon across the ocean, and then drive the car off the pontoon to the other shore. While that’s happening, other pontoons of the bridge can be driven full of cars in one great non-connected ‘bridge’!
No having the technology and having the resources to build it are NOT the same.
Real world example. I want to build one of these.
I have all the tools, knowledge and technology.
I don’t have 20 grand. 