Technology

59298 readers

4608 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

212

Space is starting to look like the better mining operation (arstechnica.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

107 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It really isn't. We know it's possible, we roughly know how to build one, it's only our material science that isn't there yet. But there are promising leads in that direction and with the right investments that problem looks solvable.

https://youtu.be/lldv_u4R6BU?si=65llxa5uHygOlT3K

With FTL our current science is saying that it's probably impossible and will never happen. We might be wrong about that, but if we are it's not going to be cracked anytime soon.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yes, we have the theory of what is required to build one but every material we have (including graphene and carbon nanotubes) is about 2-3 orders of magnitude below the tensile strength that is required for a space elevator on earth. Add in the fact that the longest graphene and carbon nanotube we can currently produce is in the mm range and we need it to be ~50,000 km and perfect at the atomic level we would be at best decades away from production if they could be used.

Ironically the best place for us to begin is in space.

Building space elevator on the moon is much, much easier (1/6 G and no atmosphere) and Mars is also a much easier proposition than on earth (1/3 G and 1/1000th the atmospheric pressure).

I fully expect that if humans ever build space elevators the first one will not be on earth.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

https://piped.video/lldv_u4R6BU?si=65llxa5uHygOlT3K

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.