The “cableway to Everest” was to prevent climber deaths with proper infrastructure. That is, if supplies can be hauled, you can ensure every climber always has at least 2 oxygen bottles. There would be well secured safety lines all along the route. Large floodlights making sure there’s enough light. Oxygenated and maybe pressurized heated shelters to sleep in at night. Climbers wouldn’t have to haul anything but their protective clothing and oxygen, the food would be prepared and shipped up to each waypoint camp, the tents and ropes would be part of the climbing course. If someone has a medical emergency, there would be small aid stations with defibrillators and all the other lifesaving gear and they could be rushed back to better facilities through a cable car.
People would still die, but basically only from heart attacks from over-exertion and only rarely. You could even equip each climber with heart monitoring gear, similar to apple watches, and pull the ones who show the signs of failure. Also require an angiogram and stress tests before they are allowed to climb. Also expand the summit of Everest so that more climbers can take their selfies in parallel, and add safety nets.
If you can do daily battery or fuel cell changes, climbers could use heated suits (heating elements over the kidneys, in the gloves, in the boots), making the protective clothing lighter and also able to save them from hypothermia during blizzards.
I take it you’ve never worked on a drill rig, seen the terrain of Everest, or thought more than 2 minutes about any of this. Explain how you will get a drill rig up the mountain and drilling on 45° slopes. Or drill to bedrock by hand.
Please also show your calculations for the forces that will be applied to these structures by the moving glaciers, what kind of material is needed to resist these forces, and how deep the supports must be. No hand waving - you say it can be done, prove it.
Don’t be absurd. Your argument is something akin to “yes, humans have built thousands of miles of railways in high, mountainous conditions, and they’ve visited the Moon, and they have massive facilities in Antarctica, and have oil rigs in the deep ocean, and the North sea, and nuclear submarines (under the arctic), and space stations…”
But this ONE really high mountain, one that thousands of people have hiked, with minimal climbing, to the peak of, now that’s going to stymie every possible effort or method you might use. In order to prove otherwise, I want you to produce a detailed plan or I won’t even concede it’s possible…
Yeah, whatever. You’re a moron. I had you on ignore, and even Tripler and wolfman I don’t anymore.
Not to relitigate the Everest thread, but climbers falling from a part of Mt Everest is not a major cause of death on Everest. A part of Mt. Everest falling on climbers ( avalanches and serac falls ) is a much more frequent cause of death. That instability would make it difficult to construct and protect massive permanent infrastructure.
And oxygen tents and pressure chambers are not interchangeable.
Thank god, I can now feel no temptation to respond to his idiocy. I’d say take over for me, but you all know the futility. I think I’ll drink a beer to celebrate my first ignore (or at least the first who admitted it).
So…the logical thing is to suspend something, away from the mountain. Held in place by tension or with redundant supports. Maybe breakway components for when an avalanche takes out a support column.
I didn’t pick a cableway out of a hat. I know in general it’s doable.
As for the oxygen tent/pressure chamber : no shit. I’m frankly not sure what happens to human lungs with long exposure to low pressure pure oxygen, I’ve read it can lead to problems but it’s much slower than the same exposure at full pressure.
So obviously you’d choose oxygen tents - separated from each other and with fire suppression integrated - if you could, but if that won’t cut it, maybe pressure chambers. This ‘infrastructure’ concept has permanent staff on the mountain, so they might need to wear pressurized suits and live in pressure chambers. Not to sea level pressure, just an increase of a few bar, perhaps with a gas mix with less nitrogen and some other inert gas.
But this ONE really high mountain, one that thousands of people have hiked, with minimal climbing, to the peak of, now that’s going to stymie every possible effort or method you might use
You’re calling…me…the idiot? Shrug. I would think any sentient being who isn’t a dementia patient would have some doubts over their own intelligence here. Trout, you draw any clocks recently? Can you smell peanut butter? I’m a little worried about you here.
Not too much though–alcohol is hard on the brain cells and you’ve probably lost a lot just reading that moron’s amazingly stupid “ideas” just regarding a disney ride to the top of Everest, let alone anything else that’s dribbled out of his slack piehole. Pace yourself, homie, let things regenerate in there a bit.
I’ve witnessed first hand the amazing amount of work it takes to get construction equipment into a relatively accessible canyon in the Sierra Nevada to put in a geothermal power plant, I’m boggling that anyone would think it a trivial matter to construct something even more ambitious up the highest peak in the world. I mean, just filling in enough of a canyon to make a foundation spot for a modest power plant required YEARS of dozers winching and hauling each other up and down slopes that were nowhere near what’s normal on Everest, and let’s not even bother factoring in the weather and snow load and avalanche and landslide potential because it’s already impossible–and for what, so a few idiots can take selfies up there without risking death? I mean, fuck all the people who’d likely die trying to construct the fucking thing, sheesh.
Did you actually plan this operation or just watch with a can of beer? Or maybe you were one of the guys hauling sandbags?
Please quote the post where I said it was trivial. I said it’s possible. The other side of the argument said it’s impossible and I was “digging” to even continue the discussion.
Are you saying it’s impossible to build an accessway of some type (whether it be highway, roadway, railway, or cableway) to within a short distance of the peak of Mt Everest, using technology available in 2018? (since 2019 isn’t over yet. Note that trivial modifications to present technology counts)
I also never said it was safe, just that the dangers are manageable. Doesn’t mean that people wouldn’t die, but with protective suits and careful planning it wouldn’t be very many.
And if you believed I said it was trivial, but I didn’t, doesn’t that call into question your own mental faculties?
Watch it, **crow, **you’re flirting with becoming as much of a drooling idiot as **SamA **already is there!
ETA: Responding to the drooler himself–yes, numbnutz, for a combination of practical and financial reasons it is impossible. There, now prove me wrong.
I have 100 billion dollars. I’ll give you 1 billion dollars if you successfully complete an access-way. Until then, you get minimum wage, and I will audit.
It is impossible to build a fixed structure through the Khumbu Icefall and along the glaciated slopes of Everest. Not difficult, not expensive, impossible.
Go back to freezing your brain or whatever. Even that made more sense than this.
Umm, you can’t think of a feasible way to bypass this mess of ice?
Maybe that fucking granite mountain in the background might give you some sort of clue what you might be able to do?
Go back to watching daytime soaps and leave the engineering work to smarter people. And keep your stupid opinions to yourself.
I mean, god damn are you a moron.
Look, here’s a goddamn article on building a cableway, high up in a mountain, dealing with most of the same challenges as everest but the low pressure.
And you can’t even imagine a fucking way to possibly adapt the same idea to another domain.
No. I’d say take your $100 billion and do it yourself. If I am going to be stuck working for minimum wage with a crazy manager standing over me I’ll go work at Burger King because I won’t freeze to death and I’ll at least get an employee discount on cheeseburgers. And I will be equally likely to produce a working cable car either way because I’m not an engineer.
I think the best argument for why a cable car or even a road up Mt. Everest is impossible is that it hasn’t been done or even tried that I know of. I know Nepal is a very poor country but I would think that if there was any way of improving access they would have done something to make it easier to bring in more tourists to spend money there. I don’t even mean climbing permits but people who want to climb to base camp spending money on lodgings and supplies.
Or to bring dead bodies off the mountain. If it’s too difficult and dangerous to bring down a 150 pound body I can’t even guess how someone could get heavy equipment and structures that would weigh tons and tons up there.
Sounds like a general argument against all progress. If we did things your way, we’d still be in the “round rocks” phase of weaponry since sharpening rocks has never been done.
As for the article on the Matterhorn cableway, There are three support towers, with the largest span between them a mighty 2732m.
Hmm…Hmm. If you can skip 2.7 kilometers with sufficiently strong and tough towers, maybe you could look at a map between Lukla and Everest, find good spots up to 3 kilometers apart, and then work out how you’re going to get the hundreds of tons of construction equipment to them. Apparently you can just skip the glaciers.
Still tough because the high altitude makes helicopters not work very well. So I guess you just give up, there’s just no possible way to get a crane up there no matter how much money or effort you were willing to go to…
You can’t anchor anything to the mountain unless you can get it over the ice which is constantly moving and breaking up. You can’t just teleport it across and even if you could you’d need a road on the other side which you can’t build unless you can get heavy equipment across and we’re back to square one here.
There’s just no way to do it. Nope. You’re right, I give up. No vehicle in the world can travel across ice or fly in the air. Also, uh, glaciers are kinda slow, last I checked. Except when they fail. But, you know, you can make them fail or collapse by setting off explosives to start the avalanche ahead of time, discharging the potential of them collapsing on you later. Like they did in Matterhorn.
