Mountain unicyling… My entire brain hurts… Thank you for making my life that much more surreal!
Trinopus
Let’s go for it, but you hold the line here, until the other end reaches mars. Now… who’s got 300 million miles of monofilament?
Wait a second. No pink tutu? Without the tutu, and an undersized parasol, that sport just looks silly.
Sadly we had the power plant, built, tested and running but gave up on it.
You could build a solar sail ship, but that’s a solution to the wrong problem. Ultimately, the reason why a conventional rocket wouldn’t be practical for a trip to Mars is that it would take too damn long. A Saturn V could do it, if it only had to send an Apollo-sized capsule. But now put a couple years worth of food and oxygen and radiation shielding and health equipment and entertainment in that capsule, and you’re way over the weight limit. A solar sail would require no more fuel than it takes to get to low Earth orbit, but it would take far, far longer to get to Mars.
The cable idea has more promise. No, really. You obviously can’t run a cable the whole distance, but you can run a cable from the surface of the Earth up past geosynchronous orbit, and another one on Mars. You can get huge tonnages into orbit that way, arbitrarily cheaply. And if you go further out than geosynch on the cable before letting go, you can get a pretty hefty launch speed. The catch is that the cable needs to be strong enough and light enough to be able to support its own weight. Steel won’t do it, spider silk won’t do it. Carbon nanofiber would do it, but we don’t yet know how to make that in significant quantities. Of course, even aside from space elevators, strong, lightweight materials are always in high demand, so we’re working on ways to make it practically.