But as the stack of pennies nears the asteroid belt it is just a matter of some mining, the resources are there for the taking.
I say we do an IPO for this while things are hot.
You would need to stack your pennies on one of the poles, or the end of it would be rotating way faster than the speed of light.
That was a guess. Turns out, it’s not quite as fast as the speed of light, but close.
Time machine, great, we should be able to hit up Musk or Branson for seed money.
Sure, if they’re all shiny.
Wait, do pennies have to be shiny to be lucky? I thought they just had to be heads up?
Still, with 80 quadrillion pennies, nearly all of them will be newly minted, so they’ll be shiny.
So where is the weak point of the stack? At the base? At the atmosphere to space interface? The the end of the stack? This is not just a column but is basically a space elevator isn’t it?
All of the above? Space elevators need to be absurdly strong for their weight. A pile of squat cylinders made mostly of zinc that’s not actually connected is none of those things. I’m fairly sure you won’t get more than a few feet before the imprecision in size will make the tower fall over. If you got tall enough for weight to matter, the bottom ones would deform and it would fall. If you somehow magicked it into existence out to Pluto or whatever it would tear itself apart in a dozen ways in a few moments.
Some dick will shotgun a beer and throw the can at it as soon as it’s 6 feet high.
And take an armload of them to buy more beer.
I was wondering if the stack of pennies would crush the penny at the bottom, but I guess not – we need someone to put their thumb on top to stop the top ones from spinning off.
Fun thread. What if we started stacking them in low earth orbit.
You first. Send pics.
Something like this only we do away with the earth to space station portion. We would essentially be build a cable the diameter of a penny. How far could it go in into space before it failed and what would be the failure method? But alas, I’m thinking that a zinc cable wouldn’t be very strong but could go a couple of miles.
But since we have all the money in the world tied up in this endeavor it could be done with today’s technology.