Originally posted by: PejaPolo
Date: August 28, 2018 at 12:45 AM
Source: https://forum.mmajunkie.com/threads/new-global-warming-study-puts-the-fear-in-scientists.72855/
BeepBoop said:
Prepare yourself for a BeepBoop essay sir. I did a few hours of research and this is what I came up with. Have fun.
Well the atmosphere isn't a solid object like the surface of a balloon it's made up of a layers of various gases like Ozone (O3) which protects the earth from the massive amount of ionizing radiation that's being emitted from the nuclear reactions occurring in stars. The gases that make up the atmosphere stay there because of the gravitational pull of the planet. Since it's gas, it's easily permeable by a solid object, and since an elevator or a vacuum tube or w/e would be anchored in space outside of the gravitational reach of the earth it would just have to tethered to the planet so that it spins with it. As long as the elevator remains in exact geosynchronous orbit with the earth the gases in the atmosphere would just conform around it the same way a gas would displace itself the same way that a gas would move out of the way if you were waving your hand through it. And the atmosphere of the planet would still be a closed "balloon" if you will.
So the issues is more of a structural concern of making sure that the thing remains totally stable so as not to reach a speed where the station in orbit and the rotation of the earth become out of sync which would cause the tube/elevator to bend side ways which even if it was made out of a bendable material the parts in thee upper atmosphere would begin to produce friction from the speed at which the solid object is moving through the gas, which would produce a heat and begin to dissolve the same way most meteors burn up in the upper atmosphere. So the material that makes up the part of the structure that could possibly be exposed to that much heat would need to be a metal that doesn't conduct heat, like titanium alloy they make bank vaults out of, even if the entire bank was on fire if you were sealed inside the vault, titanium is so dense that at a thickness of just a few feet, you wouldn't even experience the air inside the vault rise at all assuming it was totally sealed.
The rest of it that is below the outer atmosphere would need to be built into sections so if a hurricane force wind interacts with it, it would just bend and sway without breaking the structure. Similar to how very tall buildings like the Empire State Building are built to have a natural amount of give to stabilizing pillars have a slight sway to them so that the outer parts of the upper floors aren't facing the full force of a sudden gust of wind, otherwise the structure takes the full force of every gust and the windows would shatter in the upper parts of the building every time there was a bad storm. And eventually parts of the outer structure like the beams on the outside would begin to take an increasing amount of damage.
The main challenge IMO lies in making sure the entire length of the structure from it's base on the ground all the way to the space station positioned outside of the earth's gravitational pull would have to be totally structural sound, and from sea level to that distance just to where our atmosphere ends and space begins is about 62 miles or about 100 kilometers straight up and that's not including the distance the orbiting space station would have to be to not be pulled by earths gravity - well that's basically where the International Space Station is at right now, so all in all the structure would have to be about 240 miles long and totally structurally sound from start to finish. It would have to be built and assembled in sections, and it would take hundreds of thousands of various workers, scientists and engineers probably a couple of decades to complete it. Financially speaking, it'd probably be several trillions of dollars, so it would a world wide effort of at least a few dozen of the worlds richest countries cooperating and devoting substantial portions of their government's annual budgets as well as mining the raw resources to assemble the various materials to ever see the thing completed. Even if it was finished, one faulty section of that 240 miles fails for some reason and it could cause the entire thing to fall apart. There would have to be failsafe after failsafe to anticipate any part of any of it going wrong, because if even a few miles of the section in space sped through atmospheric reentry and hit for example, the middle of any ocean it would cause a tsunami that would annihilate dozens of major cities and kill hundreds of millions of people all at once. If it landed on the ground somewhere it'd basically be like the asteroid the killed the dinosaurs with the amount of debris and ash it would churn up. Even if the pieces landed in relatively remote areas, your still look at at a lot of dead people and a half a century of cleaning it up and dealing with the aftermath. On a positive note, tons of impact debris in the air would cool the planet down really f---ing fast which would just destroy the climate in the opposite direction tons of crops and plants and animals would just die off.
So yeah. Now that I fleshed out that idea and did some research on it, it's most likely too big, too expensive and too dangerous to try it with our current level of tech. Maybe in 30 or 40 years of tech advancement in engineering and science and an army of robotic workers and inventions of more pliable and durable materials for the construction it could be done, but while we could do it now, it's too far fetched for too many reasons. Guess we're all gonna slowly get hotter til someone figures out a different solution.
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Very nice report here BB2. What I'm wondering now is if there is any way that is doesn't have to be attached to the earth and just long enough that it is through the atmosphere. But then we get into tech that is even further away than what you proposed. I watch too much sci-fi because I'm picturing a GIANT island looking plane or something even crazier lol. What comes to mind is the same image as when they show a representation of a wormhole and it has the two ends that fan out. The more I think of ideas the more impossible it seems. Especially when our tallest structures are no where near the height we'd need for the plan you originally stated.
Good info, just sucks how far fetched it all is though
