I fully agree the international cooperation scenario is the more likely of the two as far as reality goes; I just don’t think it’s very compelling television.
And I don’t think the cost of the beanstalk is necessarily as prohibitive as you think. The Wikipedia article says cost estimates start at 5 billion for a simple tether and I’ve seen estimates up to 40 billion for a decent setup. Granted, that’s the entire fortune of the top couple of billionaires of today and usually only national governments are willing to risk that sort of change, but keep in mind we’re talking about a hypothetical billionaire of 2050 with who knows how much money.
Perhaps not, but the idea of several beanstalks produced by competition by several different multinational civilizational alliances would make excellent television. (See above.)
Man, that would be really nauseating, wouldn’t it? I sure wouldn’t want a room with a downward window.
I’m curious why people think International Cooperation is unlikely for this project. Granted, the ISS hasn’t been without its problems, but it’s up there.
Well, let’s just say it wouldn’t be a UN project. We just haven’t reached the point, and are not likely to within 50 years, where all nations, or even all major nations, can cooperate on something like this. More likely, several competing blocs or alliances will emerge and each will build its own beanstalk and its own colonies. I.e., there will be no British or French colonies in space, only EU colonies. There might or might not be American colonies – depends on the status of our relations with the EU at the time.
Another aspect of multiple competing elevators is a sort of mutually-assured-destruction problem. Each one may have to worry about being a potential target, but they also have to worry about anything that might go wrong with the others.
If you’re anywhere on an elevator’s cable, be it the car, the geosynch station or even the counterweight, the idea of another cable and it’s various appliances being cut loose has got to be scary.
The earthbound portion of a cut cable could be long enough to wrap around the planet, which could easily foul other cables. The stations and counterweight could fly off at high speed, and might chop off another elevator on its way to high orbit.
Of course, the elevator systems would have loads of defenses against accidental cuts, but a determined human could get around them. A terrorist threat of damaging any of the elevators would risk the integrity of all of them.
So there’s plenty of plot hooks about defending your system, but also some about assuring the security of the others. TV writers always love the plot in which a prejudiced member of one culture is forced to work with those he hates for mutual benefit.
Just thougt of a neat special-effects challenge for the show.
Imagine if the cable-end counterweight were cut loose from the cable. The geosync station could be made with a safety system to deal with such a problem by sliding itself a few thousand miles out on the cable, acting as a temporary counterweight and keeping the earthward portion of the cable stable.
The effect this would have on the station, aside from the more obvious disruptions of the cable whipping around and the sudden movement to a higher orbit, is that there would suddenly be a centrifugal force perpendicular to the normal artificial gravity of the rotating rings of the station. All the floors would feel like they were sloped, even though they had not moved. It would be a tough special effect, but it would be a masterpiece of cool if they could pull off the visual well enough that your average earther could feel what it would be like. Maybe they’d stop rotation for the duration of the emergency, and everyone would have to get used to living on what used to be the wall farthest from Earth.
Another possibility is that you could have Orion-type nuclear bomb propelled spaceships. One reason why the concept isn’t feasible today is that no one wants to release large amounts of fallout into the atmosphere. But if a tether was available to lift large amounts of mass cheaply into orbit, then the ship could be built and launched from orbit. With the tether AND Orion, suddenly you could talk about sending million-tonne shipments to Mars for a price approaching commercial air freight.
Needless to say, even then the idea of having a ship with hundreds of live nukes onboard would be controversial. But if there was a sufficient payoff to overcome the opposition, it might happen. Let’s say that biotech is big, big industry in this scenerio. Non-terrestrial bacterial life is discovered on Mars or Europa, and the first samples to be returned to Earth could be worth tens or hundreds of billions of dollars to the first company or country that could crack it’s genes.
You can do that with the tether and no Orion, too. If you go out the geosynch height and let go, you’re in geosynchronous orbit. If you go out further and let go, you’re in a higher elliptical orbit. And if you go out far enough before letting go, you escape the Earth, and can go as far as you like. So, head to Mars, and when you get there, grab hold of the Martian cable at the right point, and shimmy down it. You’d still need propulsion, of course, for course corrections and for changing the plane of your orbit (you’d initially start off in the Earth’s equatorial plane, but would have to switch to the ecliptic plane, which probably won’t line up unless you time it just right), but that’s a small enough need that you could easily get by with chemical rockets. Especially since you can lift as much fuel as you’d like out of the atmosphere cheaply.
You also need propulsion just for propulsion, if you want to get anything from Earth to Mars in less than a year. At present, space travel means giving the spaceship one big push and then letting it drift in free-fall until it reaches the intended destination – which is fuel-efficient but very slow. An Orion craft could provide something clost to a constant-boost drive, reducing travel time by orders of magnitude.
If a typical person from 1954 is transported to the world of 2004, their fashions probably wouldn’t be seen as that unusual. They might appear to be frumpy or conservative, but they certainly wouldn’t be looked at as alien or strange. The reverse, though, isn’t true; someone from 2004 going back in time 50 years would look very out-of-place, unless they’re a rancher or cowboy type.
One thing that is much different between 1950s fashions and today is how people dress for the situation. Remember newsreel clips of old baseball games, where fans were wearing wool three-piece suits and fedoras on even the hottest afternoons? There are also cultural differences. When I look at my old yearbooks from the early 1980s, black students tended to dress more like white students; now there are sharp racial divisions in the fashions of young people.
On a related not, men’s fashions change alot less than women’s fashions. I could wear a modern suit and not look utterly out of place in 1906. Unless she’s Amish a woman would have a hard time pulling that off.
Which raises an interesting point: the impact of technology on fashion. Yes, on fashion. The biggest difference between clothing of the present and that of pre-WW2 is the availability of synthetics. Formerly, clothes were cotton, wool, linen or silk. Does every shirt you own have to be ironed before it’s presentable to wear? If not, thank polyester. So what kinds of clothing could be made with advanced “smart” materials?[ul][]Programmable color changes or video display on shirts. []Micro-sheer fabrics made from ultra-strong nanofibers. []Photovoltic cloth that could power your array of electronic gadgets. []Or the gadgets are built into the cloth. []Clothing that automatically varies it’s insulation to adapt to the ambient temperature. []Clothes that can morph into various configurations. [*]Body armor thin and light enough to wear every day, providing a meaure of personal safety, or that can automatically staunch wounds, or serve almost as an exoskeleton.[/ul]
Forget the skyhook (space elevator). You need a rocket launched from a mass driver or rail gun. It will look and sound better. As for fashion, in a totally temperature controlled environment who would need clothes?