The Incredible Machine

Factual Questions
21

All he said was that we have the material, and the cost of the material would be 40 billion.

There’s a pretty big difference between theoretically having the materials, and manufacturing them in large quantity. And there are a lot of engineering issues to be resolved. For instance, the shuttle flew a ‘tether’ a year or two ago to see how much electrical current would be generated in it. The amount was substantial. This thing could therefore wind up being a power source, too. But then, it also complicates the engineering.

Think of an analogy with a manned mission to Mars. We know how to do it - we don’t need any breakthroughs in materials or physics. But there are a ton of very difficult engineering, human factors, and budgetary problems that have to be solved first. How do humans stand up to 9 months in zero-G? How do we land them on Mars? Send an unmanned probe there first with the return lander, so that they are guaranteed a serviceable craft and fuel when they get there? Or do they take it with them? That sort of stuff.

In the case of the tether, what about satellites and space junk? They’ll be ripping past the thing every quickly. What about security? With the terrorist attacks recently, this would be a key concern. Then there’s the problem of learning how to extrude these carbon nanotubes in orbit, and the construction of a satellite large enough to do it.

So if we had all the materials we needed today, and Congress said, “Go ahead, spend what you need”, we’d probably still be 20-50 years away from being able to build one.

And once you had the tether in place, you’re probably looking at another 20-40 years of construction to make it usable. Hell, how long did the World Trade Center take to build? This thing is going to be 48 THOUSAND miles long. Twice the circumference of the Earth, straight up. That kind of makes the transcontinental railroad look like a weekend project.

22

and my star-ring jump system is completly ignored… it could work with the space elevator!

jeez, at least LOOK at it… it’s incredibly depressing for someone’s ideas to be utterly ignored…

oh, as an aside and isn’t the stuff that nanotubes and buckyballs are composed of called fullerene? because they are simply folded lattices of carbon in a hexagonal pattern, which is what fullerene is…

23

How about an artificial eye.

The technology is here just couple of practical problems come up.

How to fit so much computing power into space of an eye. How to stick a power supply in there. How to make all the nerve connections. How to get lenses to give such greate focusing abilities.

Just to many problems to actualy make it.

24

Okay, I read all about your ring idea. Sorry, but it just doesn’t make any sense to me. Basically, your idea consists of sending reaction mass out in front of the spaceship, and then letting the spaceship grab it and accelerate it backwards to increase its velocity.

Here are the problems. First, using a magnetic driver to throw the ring backwards doesn’t strike me as being very efficient. The efficiency of a propulsive system is determined by the velocity at which the reaction mass can be ejected out the back.

As for paying itself by sending ‘packages’ back, that seems wildly inefficient. If you’ve got that mass aboard, you are much better using it to make rocket fuel than widgets. If you want to make stuff in Zero G, just put a factory in earth orbit. Why make it an interstellar ship?

I think you are imagining a giant mass driver to the stars. But the problem with your system is that it isn’t rigid. As you pull on the rings, you’ll send them backwards, smashing into other rings.

Another problem is the amount of mass required. To build enough rings to get you to relativistic speeds would require a phenomenal amount of mass. Remember, if the ship if much more massive than the rings, then there is a limit to how much acceleration it can get from them.

And how do you get the rings out in front of the rocket? By what means do you accelerate a ring to velocities high enough to get it way, way out into space, then brake it to hold it motionless there? If you’re going to put that much mass into orbit, why not just turn it into a big-ass fuel tank and allow the ship to propel itself by shooting the same mass as all the rings out the back in a rocket exhaust? That would be way more efficient, and wouldn’t require all the fancy logistics.

There are a ton of other problems as well, but the bottom line is that your ring system ‘solves’ a problem that doesn’t need solving, and introduces a whole whack of complications to create a propulsion system that is far less efficient than the ones we already have.

25

Didn’t Charles Babbage create a blueprint for a Anylitical Machine, or Difference Engine (One or the other), which was a massive steam driven clockwork computer…100 years before
the UNIVAC?

The ultra-fine tolerances for the clockwork components were beyond the technology of the time (In excess of 1/10,000 th
of an inch). There was some talk about creating a working model of this machine, but the idea was scrapped.

26

You need to reread it Sam. I think you missed the second post where i updated my idea to fix a couple of the problems you pointed out.

one, the rings aren’t stable- the beauty of the system is that each unit, whether a package or a ring, is acting on each other equally in opposite directions, and both accellerate equally. My first idea, however, wouldn’t work for the reasons you pointed out; the intermediary station would slide out of alignment eventually, and would continually lose mass with no way to replace it. rather than update that, i simplified the system rather that work around the problems.

two, your point about the inefficiency of the ship is valid. if you will notice my update, however, the purpose of the ship is reduced from the primary purpose to simply the method of threading the system. So, i changed it from a “magnetic rocket to the stars”, which would be horribly inefficient, to an “interstellar magnetic tram” which would be extremely efficient, if only in the extremely longer term. the problem with this is that you have to know that you want a permanent route of transfer between the two places you connect.

three, your point about the inefficency of magnetics;
though it is true that the ship is much heavier than the rings, the packages sent through arent. they will be accellerated at the same rate the rings are. later, when that’s all that the system is, there should be no “mass slide”.

four, your point about the paying for itself, the mass required, and the last one that essentially says “a rocket would be better”;
Now, though it is quite true that for an individual ship, if you were sending all that mass out it would be a lot more efficient to just use some sort of advanced propulsion system and be done with it.
However, in my system (in the update) the fact is that it is a continuous system, with a permanent route between two points. that would be a lot more efficient than a number of rockets, as the mass used to make the rings and packages is recovered at their final destination, reduced by whatever mass was used to produce power onboard.

27

Arthur C. Clarke’s ‘Brainman’, as described in a couple of his more recent books (3001 and The Hammer of God), comes to mind (mind…brain…hur hur hur). It’s essentially a neural impulse recording and playback unit. You stick it on your head, set it to ‘record’, do something fun, and then you can re-experience every sensation of what you did, whenever you want. I believe very preliminary research has already been done along these lines - I remember a news story from a couple of years ago where some Japanese (I think) researchers had recorded what a cat sees on video, solely by monitoring and interpreting the cat’s ‘brainwaves.’ Pretty cool.

I hope something like the Brainman does eventually exist…imagine ‘recording’ while under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs, and then just playing back the visual and aural input while you’re sober. Or playing back dreams when you’re lucid. Or experiencing every thought and sensation had by explorers on Mars. Again, pretty cool.
Also, there’s what I thought of when I read the thread title, even though it represents an inversion of what the OP’s asking: The Antikythera Mechanism (this is just one page of many about it). Had it not actually been found and dated to around 80 BC, there’d be no reason at all to think that anything like it from that era would exist.

28

Slight hijack: Engineers have, in fact, produced an (albeit rudimentary) electronic eye. I remember seeing a blurb about it, either on tv or on the web. Basically, it was a fairly bulky (although not ludicrously so) device that that a blind man wore. I don’t know the details of how it worked, but it apparently stimulated the parts of his brain that process optical information. He could only see vague impressions of the image, this being so new and experimental, but as a demonstration he walked into a room and picked up a ball off of a stool. This was at least 2 or so years ago, so I presume there’s been more work done on it. Definitely interesting, though.

29

I’ve still got some objections to the beanstalk: First, don’t build it in my backyard. Since it’s longer than the Earth’s circumference, that’s anywhere. :slight_smile: (OK, you can build the one on Mars…)

More seriously, is this thing stable? Everyone’s envisioning a cable going straight up and not moving, but this will be subjected to atmospheric winds and reaction forces every time you use it to go to space or return. Also, it’s “48 THOUSAND miles long” (quoting Sam Stone). This gives it a lowest resonant frequency of 1 or 2 Hz. Nearby lightning strikes (or worse, hitting it) will excite currents in the beanstalk. These currents will be cutting magnetic fields, also generating forces. With all these excitations, how much will the outer end of it be whipping around? Is it going to go the way of the Tacoma narrows bridge? Although I guess when it snaps in two, only half of it will fall down. So we got that going for us. :wink:

30

Great replies till now !
I did not think about the Antikythera Mechanism when posting this thread, but the original idea came indeed from the difference engine, from Babbage.
If I am not mistaken, the machine has succesfully build with
nowadays technology.
For technical mysteries, I have seen an Iron pilon near New Delhi, India, which is several thousands years old. However
the iron is so pure, it won’t rust. And it doesn’t indeed.

31

I would say these first three things are definitely possible (artificial heart now on trial that requires only a small external powerpack) but still works in progress.

-Commercial-scale fusion reactor
-Fully internal artificial organs
-Room temperature superconductors