Imagine for a moment that Mount Everest wasn’t 29,000 feet high, but, rather, twice as high - 58,000 feet.
Assuming its slopes, crevasses and sides still provided all the suitable footholds and grips for climbing, would a climb of such an immensely high peak be doable with today’s or near-future technology?
You’d be in the oxygen-starved death zone for weeks and the hypothermia/frostbite danger would be even greater due to even colder temperatures, but could those problems be engineered through?
You need a pressure suit to survive more than a limited time above about 40,000’. The logistics of supporting this would be beyond formidable, and even for the fittest human, putting forth the necessary exertion while in a pressure suit is probably not going to happen.
So I’d say that 58,000’ is far beyond what’s humanly possible. I suspect even 40,000’ would probably be.
(Of course, if such a mountain existed, the notion of what would be acceptable by those attempting to climb it would be very different than current notions of mountaineering.)
Yeah, I doubt it could be climbed in a way that would seem like mountaineering to us, but if it existed there’s no way humans wouldn’t be on top of it at some point. It’d be more akin to the bathyscape mission to the bottom of the Marianas Trench or something, though.
When I went through the altitude chamber, they said 50,000 feet. But I’ll take your word for it.
So instead of climbing, you want to get to the top with some kind of high performance aircraft. The problem is that at 58,000 feet you need huge wings and a lot of air over the wings to stay flying. The U-2 can do it, but it can’t land you.
You’d need some kind of crazy hybrid vehicle. Like a rocket powered mountaintop landing module that resembles a moon lander, piggybacking on a high altitude aircraft that would fly over the mountaintop and drop it.
The landing module would perform a rocket powered landing onto the mountaintop (maybe the landing legs would contain explosively driven pitons or something that activate when they touch). The explorers would leave in pressure suits, explore the mountaintop, and when they are finished, they would reboard the landing module. It would make a ballistic flight into the sky and mostly sideways, and then deploy parachutes - basically launching off the mountaintop with enough lateral velocity to end up in a landing area that is at lower altitudes.
Still easier than a Moon landing, so if we lived in a world where the highest mountain were this high but everything else about the Earth were identical, someone would have planted a flag up there.
An easier way might be to slowly build some kind of track or railway using workers in pressure suits that work out of pressurized train cars. The railway track would be gear toothed to allow for extremely steep sections. Doing it this way, you could get a railway that ran all the way to the peak and tourists could visit it routinely.
Yes, doable, but would require immense support. Probably the most likely scenario involves near-future battery powered exoskeletons that would support the additional weight of the required pressure suit (so your blood doesn’t boil) and other apparatus needed to support a human.
The best way would be for robots to build a tram railway or at least some fixed ropes or cables or other infrastructure most of the way up the mountain. Then some climbing or elevator type vehicle that would ascend that path carrying the human.
It would be very difficult to create a pressure suit that allows eating much food, which means we need either pressurized way stations, or that the final climb needs to be done in a single push. Actually, at a certain point we’d need pressurized stations anyways for sleeping, etc.
It would be an extraordinary challenge, but in a way less about human endurance and more about engineering.
Yeah, basically what Habeed said.
Though I personally think it would be tougher than the moon landing.
A mountain this tall would still have weather, not just seasonal but all-the-time weather. And if this mountain is “everest-like” I think any landing zone would be much more difficult to hit. The moon had zero weather and a huge flat landing zone. Also it had weak gravity, allowing a nice descent of the lander.
Building anything on the surface of the mountain would be a huge challenge too.
There’s not a 3 day flight there and back, however. You don’t need an immense rocket, either - just a carrier aircraft similar to the White Knight carrier aircraft. That’s orders and orders of magnitude cheaper. You need a lot less rocket fuel because you don’t have to decelerate from orbit and then return to orbit.
Yes, the technical difficulties of landing onto a mountain top itself in the weather is harder, but everything else about the mission is much easier.
I also looked up geared railways. You’d need a mechanism similar to the “Locher rack” which appears to be capable of almost vertical grades.
Pressure suit with an unlimited supply of oxygen and a method of using that pressure suit and oxygen line while climbing. I envision a pipe of oxygen all the way to the top with places to refill every 100 yards. You could even use the pipe to pull yourself along.
I don’t think you need a pressure suit. These days for lower pressure environments they are talking about tight-fitting clothing - pretty much the same as a tightish wetsuit or even just whole-body compression stockings. I think this variant is on the cards for a Mars mission.
The main problem will be High Altitude Cerebral Edema which is common at 29,000 feet and will be just about universal at 50,000 feet.
Depending on the weather I guess. After allowing for the effect of salt etc in the blood, it looks like it might be a marginal altitude for blood boiling?
A bit off topic, but Kim Stanley Robinson’s novella, Green Mars (not the novel of the same name) is all about climbing Olympus Mons, which is about three times the height of Everest, but on Mars.
Gravity is less, but low pressure and the need for oxygen over the course of a long, strenuous expedition are addressed. Not what you’re asking about, but you might find it interesting.
It’s actually over 60,000 feet, although without a p-suit you’d be just barely surviving as you approached the summit; you’d have a hard time actually climbing.
That’s the altitude at which water boils at body temperature - the Armstrong Limit. Well below that you have the problem of insufficient blood oxygenation, even if you’re breathing 100% oxygen.
Could probably be done more easily with a balloon.
:smack: Thanks for the correction. However, I did find this on that page:
4700 meters = 15,419 feet. This is well below the altitude at which bottled O2 becomes necessary during mountain climbing (to increase the partial pressure of O2 in the climber’s lungs). In fact, some climbers have summited Everest without using supplemental O2. This means that by breathing pure O2 without a pressure suit, a climber should be able to handle altitudes at which the ambient pressure is equal to the O2 partial pressure at the summit of Everest.
At the summit of Everest (29,000 feet), ambient pressure is about 4.6 psi; O2 partial pressure is 20% of this, 0.92 psi. According to my standard atmosphere model, ambient pressure dips to 0.92 psi at 63,000 feet.
It is of course slightly more complicated than that. Without supplemental O2, climbers cannot survive indefinitely in the death zone, i.e. altitudes above 26,000 feet. The length of time that a climber can remain there isn’t clearly stated, but of course if you’re climbing a 58,000 foot mountain, it’s going to take a lot longer than if you were climbing Everest. However, breathing atmospheric air at 26,000 feet is equivalent to breathing pure O2 at 60,000 feet. So you could breathe pure O2 at the summit of your 58,000-foot high mountain, and still not be in the death zone (as far as your physiology is concerned).
The challenge, then, is a logistical one: you can climb the mountain without a pressure suit if you’ve got a supply chain that can bring enough bottled O2 for you to breathe during the entire adventure. But that’s a LOT of O2. Unlike Everest, your bottled O2 wouldn’t be a supplement to atmospheric air; it would be a substitute. I’ll leave it to someone else to do the math on how many liters of air a person breathes in a day, and how many days it might take to climb the 58K’ mountain.
Maybe there would be some unique portable machine invented for climbers that could take the water from surrounding snow, split the H2O apart, and harvest the oxygen for breathing. Or is that totally impractical?
And perhaps there wouldn’t be any snow above, say, 40,000 feet, because it would be higher than the altitude of snow-depositing clouds?
The process exists; you’d basically be un-burning hydrogen. You’d need to supply at least as much energy as was released when hydrogen burned to make that water. In fact, you’d need a lot more, since the process tends to be very inefficient. You’d also need to liquify the snow, which requires still more energy.
Unless you’ve got a pocket-sized version of Mr. Fusion, this ain’t happening during your ascent.
I couldn’t find any site giving the likely greatest height that Everest will reach, but one site said that it has grown a mile in the last 26K years or so. At that rate, it will be over 50K feet in around 100K years, roughly.
Slaps myself upside the head. I’m silly. You’re absolutely right. Balloons can easily reach that altitude, and you could tune your balloon for neutral buoyancy just above the peak of the mountaintop.
It would have to be a powered balloon more like a blimp with one heck of a turbocharger on the engine but that’s straightforward engineering. Just drop long cables down and zipline right to the surface, or maybe drop a big cable with an explosive driven piton anchor on the end to the surface to secure your blimp to the peak.
That’s got to be the easiest way, by far, and it could be done for mere dozens of millions of dollars probably.