Space Elevator vs Wildlife

An anonymous reader writes "The longest test yet of the technology that might one day lead to space elevators has revealed some unusual problems. From the article: "There were several unexpected encounters with wildlife. More than a dozen insect egg colonies had been laid on the tether and curious bats flew around the balloons, apparently attracted by the sound made by the tether's vibrations. Late in the test, swallows were also seen swooping down on the balloons, possibly to sip the morning dew on their surfaces." Maybe all the critters just want to go to space too."

Other issues and possible resolution

[LiquidCoooled]

Once it gets out into space, wouldn't the long carbon tether become charged?

Like the static we discharge walking around the office, any critters setting up home will be in for a nasty shock.

Buckle and deformation problems

[radarsat1]

The team learned that if the tether is pulled hard by wind, it starts to buckle and deform slightly, creating crinkles. The robot climber hit these crinkles and could not proceed because they made the tether too thick for it to handle.

"We broke our robot by doing this," Laine says. "It's the kind of failure we never would have learned had we only been doing 6-hour tests." Future designs will have to incorporate sensors to tell the robot when it is about to encounter varying thicknesses.
Strong but thin

Hm... do you think that if your tether is beginning to BUCKLE AND DEFORM, you might have a slightly more fundamental problem than just needing to redesign the robot?

Well, I'm sure they're aware of it. But this kind of thing probably won't become more obvious until they do a 6-month test, I guess. Or 6-years. But the potential for your tether to break off eventually is probably going to be a slight drawback.

60,000 mile tether - not possible

[us7892]

This idea just doesn't seem possible. A 60,000 mile tether, strong enough to carry a satellite sitting on a robot elevator all the way up into space. And then successfully deploying the satellite off the elevator. And this would be cheaper than rockets that send satellites into orbit now?

A space elevator sounds great, it just seems far-fetched. A 100 meter test. Only 96,560,540 more meters to go.

Ants

[StarfishOne]

Crazy thought:

Assuming ants can climb up the elevator, I wonder which altitude they could reach, given the fact that they supposedly don't need a lot of oxygen with their small bodies. (I know that ants don't have lungs and breathe through tiny pores, but still)

Re:Just goes to show...

[PatrickThomson]

And I wouldn't exactly call that informative ...

Since this is an inappropriate mod thread I expect to become interesting.

Re:Buckle and deformation problems

[vmcto]

Why can't they make the tether resemble a giant 35mm film strip? I think I undertsand that to achieve the strength necessary, the carbon nano-tube structures need to be relatively long and contiguous, but the portions on the edge would only need to be locally strong enough to support the weight of the climber not the weight of the tether itself. And the climber could use an arbitrary large number of the "sockets" on the edge. Perhaps there are good reasons why this wouldn't work, but if it could it would simplify the mechanics of climbing significantly by reducing the need to grasp the tether so tightly that localized changes in thickness would prevent operation.

Nothing but space, though none of it empty

[Pfhorrest]

Nature still abhors a vacuum. It's just that 0.000...0001% matter is the best she can do with the available resources.

I wrote a paper about this once. [west.net]

The entire universe is "vacuum" if by "vacuum" you mean the absence of "solid, extended" matter.

Matter isn't solid. It's make of loosely bound atoms. Even atoms aren't solid. They're tiny nuclei surrounded by lots of "empty" space, filled only with infinitesimal electrons (i.e. point-particles, with a size of precisely zero) and the forces they exert. Those forces are what keep other atoms from occupying the same space, and what give the atoms the appearance of being solid. We all know that much around here.

But the nuclei themselves are composed of separate nucleons bound together by nuclear forces, and it's just those forces which keep nuclei from occupying the same space, same as the electromagnetic force keeps atoms "solid". Inside the nucleus is still more "empty" space.

But those nucleons themselves are just bundles of quarks held together by still different nuclear forces.

Quarks, however, are infinitesimal point-particles, just like electrons. They occupy no space; they're just points of zero extension.

Nothing in the universe is "extended", and things are only "solid" to the point that nothing below a certain energy threshold can overcome the forces keeping things out of a certain part of space, i.e. "solid" is relative. There's just infinitesimal point-particles and the interactions (forces) between them. The rest of it is "empty" space. Though as that space is universally permeated by the forces of those point-particles (there's electromagnetic fields, albiet sometimes very weak, everywhere in the universe), and has effects of it's own (e.g. gravity, which also permeates the entire universe), it can hardly be called empty.

Re:What about Airplanes?

[green1]

we already have proven systems in place to keep air traffic away from stationary objects, what I'd be more concerned with would be failure modes, if something were to cause the tether to break, (wether it be your airplane, or any of a number of other situations) it would seem that there would be a LOT of tether to fall to earth... I certainly wouldn't want to be under it if it fell... and with the length of the tether, I would expect a rather large radius that would have the potential to be affected.

I would bet this has already been thought of, but I'd be curious to see what came of these thoughts?

Re:robot tests are dumb

[Mr. Foogle]

It sounds like the guy you're replying to is part of Liftport. I can only imagine that's why his response was so polite.

I'm a system administrator at Liftport, yes. Which is part of why I was polite. But mostly 'polite' is my default mode.

Also, you never can tell - maybe the guy is a frickin' engineering Einstein and just isn't able to fully spread his creative wings wherever he is.