Solipsism Gradient

Noted SF writer and physics professor Gregory Benford writes about what should come “Beyond the Shuttle”. (Excerpted on Brad deLong’s blog.) The article is also discussed on SlashDot.

This weblog is now syndicated by Syndic8.

Also, NetNewsWire Pro now lists my RSS feed in its default sites drawer. Thanks, Brent!

Here’s an update to my previous post about this.

HighLift Systems has a proposal for a small-scale space elevator. Instead of a large-diameter (5 to 20 meters) full-scale beanstalk, they propose a 10-20 cm wide ribbon which would be only fractions of a millimeter thick. This is based on a NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts study.

This design would drive costs down into the $10-billion range – much less than what AOL/TimeWarner lost last year – and allow payloads of a few tons.

The ribbon would be 100,000 km long and weigh about 750,000 tons. There’s a FAQ which answers many questions about safety. For instance, the ribbon would wrap 2.5 times around the Equator if it fell down… but such a thin ribbon would be mostly evaporated during re-entry. Dana Blankenhorn elaborates further on problems and opportunities. However, Carey Gage, among others, makes the point that such a structure is presently impossible to defend.

Oops.

My rating on vnunet‘s Geek-o-meter is (tah-dah!) 97%.

Ooh, who’s a clever boy then? Or, increasingly (and eventually exclusively) who’s a clever girl then? You really are a geek, and you do know your stuff. You didn’t get fooled by those laughably easy questions. On the other hand, which did you get wrong? How very annoying. Now you’d better just go back and try it again (and again, and again), or you’ll never be able to rest easy. Obsessive idiot.

Yeah, right! What did I get wrong…?

Thanks to Simon Bruning’s Small Values of Cool for the link.

Rafael Fischmann, um dos donos/sócios/fundadores/responsáveis pelo excelente MacMagazine mudou para a Nova Zelândia para um programa de intercâmbio de um ano.

Para manter contato com os amigos, está publicando um blog com fotos e outras evidências do choque cultural. Claro que imediatamente contratou uma linha ADSL para poder continuar mantendo o MacMagazine no seu copioso tempo livre… realmente a geografia está ficando irrelevante!

Wired has an article about building a beanstalk. This means a structure reaching from someplace on the Equator right into geosynchronous orbit and beyond; depending on your point of view, this can be considered a tower, an elevator, or a cable. There are several proposals. Placing an asteroid into orbit and spinning out two cables – one inwards, one outwards – seems to be the most practical way. Elevators would go along the cable and lower the cost of getting stuff into and out of orbit to less than 1% of current levels.

The only material theoretically able to resist the enormous stresses and support its own weight is made of carbon nanotubes. Only in the past few weeks some researchers have been able to make longer strands of nanotubes (20 centimeters) in larger quantities, but a beanstalk would need billions of tons of meter-long nanotubes bound into a light but strong matrix. This kind of manufacturing may become possible over the next few decades.

As any SF reader knows, this sort of thing has been featured in several books. Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Fountains of Paradise” is the first I recall offhand. I’ll post a more comprehensive list later.

Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Red Mars”, “Green Mars” and “Blue Mars” go into much more detail about the technical and political aspects of building such a thing. But he also discusses the scary aspects: who will control the elevator? What if it’s brought down by terrorists?

Ernie the Attorney explains why filesharing is good for the music industry, inspired by an article in Salon:

Embrace file-sharing, or die

A record executive and his son make a formal case for freely downloading music. The gist: 50 million Americans can’t be wrong…

Time.com has comments on the possible cause of the accident. They say that most probably the International Space Station will be evacuated somehow and then abandoned for a few years at least. Dave Winer’s Scripting News pointed at that link and posted many others.

Ernie the Attorney quotes Richard Feynman‘s thoughts on the Challenger accident:

…For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.

Doc Searls‘ comments on Challenger are also worth rereading. Jim Flowers is yet another weblogger setting up a collection of links and comments on the accident.