[Liberator]

Stryke is correct, in this matter, the US Government actively opposes certain technologies because certain groups in this country fear what could happen should such things as cheap electricity from nuclear power or a multitude of other tech that should be mainstream become available to the general public.

Certain parties don't want cloning or genetic research to proceed because they consider it to be playing God.  This is of course laughable, God created from nothing, we are simply reproducing or slightly altering His work.

[Stryke 9]

Rictor: How does moon mining benefit people who can't afford a multibillion dollar miner? What good is fancy new space-age technology to people who don't have electricity? These things are not common to an incredible majority of the planet's population, and things aren't going to change. I mean, are you really imagining a Cambodian space program here or something?




**** surveillance sattelites, with a basic conception of rocketry and the ability to send a few tons of cheap material up the very poorest of countries would have access to a crude MDW that could be far more effective than nukes. Pissed off at your neighbor? Just drop a manmade "meteor" on their capitol city.

Naturally, such is impractical and ludicrous, but it's almost precisely the pretext the US would probably put sanctions on any countries developing new space programs and restrict use of an elevator.

[Setekh]

Wait, this isn't just a secret project in Alpha Centauri? That's exciting, really. I can't wait for mankind to reach its hands further up and out of our cradle.

[Carl]

Originally posted by Rictor
If you manage to hit something so thin with an airplane, well then you deserve to.

The target is always at least the size of the projectile. if the plane is 40 feet across, then it can be off by 20 feet to the left or right and still hit it.

[icespeed]

What's wrong with building half a space elevator? Then you'd only have to make really strong cable one eighth of the way to the moon. You could have like, a floating platform or something... oh wait, we don't have antigravity, do we.

[Rictor]

I'm neither a scientist nor an economist, so don't start asking me about the benefits to third world countries. Personally, I'm satisfied with taking an educated guess that there would be some. And unless you are one of the above, don't start pretending you know either.

I'm talking about the nature of such an endeavor. I don't know about you, but in the better, brighter future that I wish for, you've got countries trying to get away from nationalistic chest-beating and you've got humanity working internationally to advance our race.

I don't know about you, but I don't want to spend th rest of my days living in a Cold War environment that has become the normalcy. China, Japan, the EU, the US, Russia and possibly the likes of India and Pakistan, in constant competition and constantly trying to sabotage each other's effort at, well, everything. Thats like cars at a racetrack trying to win the race by bumping the others into a ditch. You end up with one winner, but everyone else is worse off.

Why does there have to be a race? Why does one country, your country, have to be THE BEST. Who cares. Why do you want to be able to look down on everyone else 'cause they don't have a space prgram or running water or 120 TV channels. How about, instead of spending $500 billion yearly on tanks and guns, the US used that money to feed, clothe and educate every person who needed it. If you did that, do you think you'de have *anyone* wanting to attack you, kill your citizens, destroy your buildings and so forth. Hell no. Same goes for China, for Russia and many others. Feed your people, give them healthcare, let them live life without having to work 15 hours days in order to get a moldy piece of bread so their kids don't starve. Buy a gun and you can keep one terrorist from blowing himself up. Buy a loaf of bread for 1/1000th of the price, and you get the same effect.

How long do you think humanity can keep this up, this struggle for supremeacy over everyone else? 50 years? A hundred? And then what? Let the age of the Empire pass, its a thing of the past. You've got one world. Thats really as simple as it gets. One world, and one people. You think that some poor ****er in Somalia doesn't have the same hopes and dreams as a soccer mom in California? A line on a piece of paper dividing the world means nothing. Its an illusion, designed to keep humanity fighting amonst itself so that a handful of people can wield ultimate power.  This military, economic, political, cultural competition is not sustainable. Sooner or latter, its going to end in disaster.

****, that sounds very idealistic, but if you never strive for better then you have right now, you're never going to get any better. Strive for the best and though you will not reach perfection, you will progress. And no, I'm not a hippy :D

[aldo_14]

Originally posted by icespeed
What's wrong with building half a space elevator? Then you'd only have to make really strong cable one eighth of the way to the moon. You could have like, a floating platform or something... oh wait, we don't have antigravity, do we.

Got zeppelins, though

[Stryke 9]

Wow, Rictor, way to completely ignore everything we have ever learned about politics and human nature in the past ten thousand years. Good luck with that, y'know. I think I'll stick to predictions of the future that don't involve people suddenly ceasing to act exactly the way they have for millennia for no apparent reason and working together like some Disneyized hivemind.

[Rictor]

I hate you. You must see that.

Seriously though, no I am not expecting any significant change to come about overnight or without an enermous effort. I'm not saying that tommorow Rupert Murdoch will wake up and look out at the sun rising and give all his money away.

But saying that change in humans is impossible is a defeatist attitude. I mean, I find it hard to believe that you think that. Change has happened before, it is now happenening and I percieve that the pace will keep up if not quicken in the future. You can be both a cynic and an idealist.  My previous post laid out what I would like to happen, and what will probably at some point happen.

Its purely a matter of opinon, but I believe that now and in the near future, humanity society will undergo a change like never before.

But, you know, think what you like. I'de much rather have a world of cynics than a world a sheep.

[Odyssey]

[color=cc9900]Oh, the world will most certainly be unified. What I'm worried about is that I'll have to adopt an American accent.[/color]

[Stryke 9]

Terribly emotional, aren't we.

Change is possible, certainly. But change in the fifty years you're talking about... no. At absolute "best", in fifty years we'll be seeing a wide-scale collapse of society which might lead to something nice after a couple centuries of Dark Ages. Or may follow a cyclical pattern and deposit humanity right back where it is now. More likely, things will be more or less business as usual in fifty, a hundred years (at about two hundred, things get hairy, and the survivability of the race as a whole is open to conjecture). And while it would technically be possible for humanity to unify, given a lot of time and some very specific circumstances, people won't, simply because there's no immediate need to on the part of those who are benefitting from the current order of things, who just so happen to be the ones who'd be key in starting a change in affairs. It's a fundamental trait of people to grab what they can, altruism doesn't come very naturally to us except in extreme situations and it's often percieved as freakish in the modern day.

A similar unification to the one you're going on about was attempted very recently, and was a catastrophic flop. Take a long look at the history of Communism, and try to figure out why (hint: it ain't anything to do with the specific Commie ideology, that was so vaguely termed they might as well have replaced the Communist Manifesto with the general idea of equality). It hasn't even been twenty years since that was shown up for the mistake it was in everywhere but Cuba, and already this stuff about how the world's gonna change overnight is cropping up again? Since when has the basic order of things ever changed that much?

And on a fundamental level, there really isn't much "change as it never happened before". People in large numbers, particularly over a broad timescale, act in a few infinitely predictable ways. What signs exactly are you seeing here that would lead you to believe that within the next generation human nature will be suddenly altered entirely?


Odyssey: Nah, it's in the US's best interests to maintain the pretense that it's not an imperial state. Empires get overthrown, after all.

[Rictor]

Originally posted by Stryke 9
It hasn't even been twenty years since that was shown up for the mistake it was in everywhere but Cuba, and already this stuff about how the world's gonna change overnight is cropping up again?

Originally posted by Rictor
Seriously though, no I am not expecting any significant change to come about overnight or without an enermous effort.

...yep.

Originally posted by Stryke 9
And on a fundamental level, there really isn't much "change as it never happened before". People in large numbers, particularly over a broad timescale, act in a few infinitely predictable ways. What signs exactly are you seeing here that would lead you to believe that within the next generation human nature will be suddenly altered entirely?

How about this. In prosperous, peaceful countries, prosperous, peaceful people are looking at the world as not liking what they see. Throughout history, if the population of Nation A was generally well off and not being opporessed, you could depend on them to go with the status quo. So, essentially, people cared little for others so long as they themselves were fed and clothed.

But now, where are you getting the most organized, most devoted, the most effective resistance to oppression, poverty, imperialism, exploitation and militarism? In the First World. North America and Europe. So, these hippy kids with their hemp and their picket lines, they're well off, and yet they're not content. They wan't everyone to be well off. I mean, count the number of activist groups currently operating in the US. Or the number of authors, directors, musicians, columnists etc, all pushing for social change.

Thats just one example. I mean, it seems like a pretty big shift to me. Just look at the anti-globalization movement. You can just chart the rise of globalization and and rise of the anti-globalization movement. The more you get, the bigger the outcry becomes. Over the past ten years, its become "the agenda" for a ton of people.

Originally posted by Stryke 9

Odyssey: Nah, it's in the US's best interests to maintain the pretense that it's not an imperial state. Empires get overthrown, after all.

The secrets out dude. Everyone in the world knows.

[Stryke 9]

The "hippie kids" you describe are not a new phenomenon. There were millions more of them a few decades ago. And an awful lot of the old flower children wear business suits these days...

And actually, there've been movements for social change in the rich countries throughout recorded history. Quite a few of them were more radical than the current one, and quite a few were more popular. While at the moment Europe does indeed look to be gearing up for something or other, it doesn't look like that and none of this is unprecedented.

There is one new factor that isn't exactly the same as something that happened a few years ago, only less so... telecommunications. Internet, phone lines, mass media, stuff like that. Bigger than ever, stretches over much of the world. Except the really poor places, of course. That might have some impact, it remains to be seen. But the insurmountable human spirit or a bunch of pissed-off college students aren't going to do much- the insurmountable human spirit seems to founder when it comes to actually doing something, and college students are only interested so long as all their friends are protesting, too. I know exactly of what I speak there, and I can tell you definitively that the overwhelming majority of those people speaking out you hope will change the world aren't for ****. Cattle. Mindless. It's disgusting how quick they are to shy away from anything that might actually workto bring about change- in the end, they're as afraid of change as anybody else. As they maybe should be- I mean, they've got an awfully cozy little niche there as the self-righteous weekend warriors, what'd they protest if anything they wanted actually happened?

[Bobboau]

why was this forced into a political thread, can't we just talk about the technical feasability of a space elevator.

how much would it take to string a cable of some sort into a geosycronus altitude, or maybe higher

[Grey Wolf]

I remember reading something that metallic hydrogen would actually be the best for that purpose, considering the fact that it's extremely strong and light. Pain to make in a lab though.

[Stryke 9]

No kidding. Isn't that the **** that forms in the cores of stars and stuff?

I imagine it wouldn't be too terribly hard to build a simple "rope bridge" out of hardened steel cable that just bends with all the massive forces that'd be hitting it. I really doubt their claim that it'd take "all the steel in the world", or even a really globally significant amount of it, looking at the amount of steel that goes into one small city, even. Regular use'd make maintaining the thing slightly less expensive than the chemical rocket avenue we use now. Basically all you'd really need would be a really long ubercable (the sort they use on suspension bridges, only, y'know, bigger and stuff) and a big cart with a motor capable of dragging a couple tons up and down the pipe on a daily basis, nothing fancy or high-tech or expensive beyond the billions range.

The trick would be getting the top end up, of course. Can't just tie one end to a rocket and launch the sucker, though that would be funny. Best way I can think to do it would involve lifting all the hundreds of tons of reinforced steel that'd be involved up in a space shuttle type thing, along with another few tons of geosync sattelite to keep the thing up there and serve as a drydock for launching whatever goes up, and then just snaking the thing down from up there and hoping the guys on the ground can catch it and plant the bottom end before a high wind picks up.

...Yeah. Me, I was always a magnetic catapult kinda guy, anyway. Of course. I mean, it's basically a giant gun, how could I say no to that?

[HotSnoJ]

I read a book once called "Red Mars" (it's a trilogy) and in it they built the cable from an asteroid the put into orbit around mars.

Seemed pretty reasonable to me...but of course later, some terrorists blow up the cupplings that held the thing in on mars and the asteroid....well I suppose you can see what I'm getting to.

[Grey Wolf]

Originally posted by Stryke 9
...Yeah. Me, I was always a magnetic catapult kinda guy, anyway. Of course. I mean, it's basically a giant gun, how could I say no to that?

Wasn't the US Army developing something along those lines?

[Stryke 9]

Probably. They're into finding all sorts of wacky ways to kill people.

I'm not entirely certain why there aren't any applications for 'em yet, except that they soak up a lot of power...

[Bobboau]

so we need somethng strong enough to be able to hold up to its own weight when its roughly 36,000 kilometers (yes 36 million meters) long for the cable. haveing the upper dock slighting higher than geosynchronous will ensure that some tension is in the line (wouldn't it?), though during early construction it would have to be right on geosynchronous.
so the first thing would be to get a giant satalite space station thingy up directly above the equator somewere, then launch a huge ****ing spool of some imposably strong material and slowly lower it to a ground (or sea) base somewere. suposedly then it would be a relitivly simple proces of sending little robots up and down the thing trailing cable behind them maybe welding them together avery few miles.

I'm thinking magapult would be better, for cargo atleast