Space elevators are more realistic for smaller planetoids and moons where you dont need as much cable strength

@JosephHarner

4 жыл бұрын

Specifically small *fast spinning* planetoids.

@ErikMoroni

4 жыл бұрын

Idk, kinda defeats the purpose though doesn't it? We want to use an elevator cause earth's gravity and atmosphere are hard to beat. Planetoids wouldn't have this problem, at least not nearly as much.

@ahmadbuthom7966

4 жыл бұрын

@@ErikMoroni but it would be more efficient even on a small moon to send materials from the surface to space instead of using rockets all the time.

@ErikMoroni

4 жыл бұрын

@@ahmadbuthom7966 Yeah, maybe if it's something like a mining operation, and the tip of the elevator is some sort of hub, that'd be awesome. But seeing how rockets are becoming more and more efficient and low cost... Guess we'll just have to wait and see.

@ahmadbuthom7966

4 жыл бұрын

@@ErikMoroni totally yeah, great example.

Who would've thought that after all of those years of studying for school, I merely needed to adopt an armchair configuration to achieve the highest GPA... /s

@Vysair

4 жыл бұрын

Wasn't it only for pull on both up and down?

@efelbar9191

4 жыл бұрын

Hello from reddit!

@lifelover69

4 жыл бұрын

Incredible

@bamsuth9650

3 жыл бұрын

imagine using /s like a socially inept redditor

@DoubleOSpanky

3 жыл бұрын

@@bamsuth9650 I know, right? Good thing I personally am a man who doesn't have one of those socially inept redditor accounts too, then people might not know I'm being sarcastic, unlike this guy here... who is clearly socially inept. /S.I. #imaginingthesociallyinept

"This is totally going to revolutionize our current process." Several years later, "Yeah..., thats not gonna work anymore because so and so."

@S....

4 жыл бұрын

Your first sentence looks like what clickbait media love to do. So yeah..

@MrGoatflakes

4 жыл бұрын

Yeah it's pretty irresponsible imo but how else would they get their funding :$

@NeoFryBoy

4 жыл бұрын

@@MrGoatflakes To be fair, it's the fault of regular people thinking the process works like: 1) New Discovery, 2) Instantly utilized in all fields. It's more like: 1) New discovery, 2) years (decades) of study and analysis in each respective field on individual projects, 3) possible utliization, if costs permit.

@NeoFryBoy

4 жыл бұрын

@@targitausrithux2320 Quantum Computing will never be used by 99.9% of the population. It's slow computing. Always has been. Always will be.

@aniksamiurrahman6365

3 жыл бұрын

@@NeoFryBoy Quantum computers are what they call Non-deterministic turning machines. Such a thing can solve NP problems in P time. That it. It's not an alternative to the deterministic turing machines we now use as computers. It's rather a different thing. So it will not replace but can become coprocessors like GPUs are becoming.

Atleast they can replace copper windings in electric motors and make it more compact lite and powerful if not in the elevators yet.

@liquidminds

4 жыл бұрын

Common road of science. People have an idea. They do research to make it possible. Figure out it isn't possible, but the research itself brings hundreds of other innovations, no one would have expected to find. The amount of things we think we can do with carbon nano tubes is vastly larger than the number ways of producing them we can imagine so far...

@abdullahtaibani

4 жыл бұрын

@@liquidminds but its foolish to talk about space elevators when you cant even commercialise it in small products

@liquidminds

4 жыл бұрын

@@abdullahtaibani "talk about" comes in varying degrees of seriousness. You can talk about the possibilities, but you shouldn't take orders to carry peoples stuff into orbit just yet... It's at best inspirational at the moment.

@abdullahtaibani

4 жыл бұрын

@@liquidminds it's not inspiration but it's a depression. Inspiration should be from the things which can bring changes in the life of a common man

@gamestarz7030

3 жыл бұрын

Well said

4:17 I very strongly disagree on the time arguement. To launch a rocket it takes weeks to prepare and build. Rockets can also fail. An elevator is there. Put it in, push the button. Time is not relevant when you can save just a tiny bit of money. I will refer to the Concord Aircraft in this matter.

@justincv

4 жыл бұрын

"Time is not relevant when you can save money"..... Try spending money when you're out of time. Dont be naive

@annoyed707

4 жыл бұрын

@@justincv Indeed. How many business and political leaders travel to conferences by ocean liner today? Time matters for some things, less so for others.

@hurktang

4 жыл бұрын

The time to build the rocket is included in the cost / kg that is mentioned. From the traveler perspective, he arrived, he paid, the rocket is there already. Also the cost of the elevator itself would be enormous. It would take years to have a return of investment on it compared to the already existing rocket. Say 10 years of usage. Now if the price of the rockets half, the 10 years would become 20 and then 40 years... The return of investment could just escape until we are done with the Dyson sphere.

@kerbodynamicx472

4 жыл бұрын

Well, Starship takes a week to build and 8 hours to prepare, and able to lift 150 tons to orbit

@Marco-zt2jj

4 жыл бұрын

@@annoyed707 yet huge cargo ships are still use to carry goods despite planes, as you said time matters for some things, not for others, space elevators would have a purpose despite being way slower

I love how HL3 was announced the day after this was uploaded

@FatCatCooper

3 жыл бұрын

Nah

Zero-defect tubes will only be made with carbon direct-deposition, not chemical-to-carbon translation via burning. We're getting there.

@killcat1971

4 жыл бұрын

I think either nanotechnology or bioenginering will pull it off.

@slevinshafel9395

4 жыл бұрын

yeah i dont know why they still try make carbon naotube from carbonization stufs? With depozition gas and electrical curent to oriented the atoms will fix this more easy. The next era will be contruction and manufacturing at atom level. in the past sigle was control the percent of material (99% Fe + 1% O2 = stainless steel)

@Storywalker4

4 жыл бұрын

Hopefully zero-defect tubes are much stronger, orbital rings around gas giants are a great way to mine the atmosphere, and would allow for rail launch systems in orbit around Earth, in which the higher orbit and lack of drag mean the velocity is much more helpful and safer.

@nmarbletoe8210

4 жыл бұрын

@@killcat1971 seems like you could get a bacterium to make near perfect nanotubes.

@Mr.Nichan

3 жыл бұрын

Literally zero defects is a lot to ask with all the atoms in a space elevator, etc. Other effects might be able to counteract most of the loss in strength due to defects if the defects were few enough though. E.g., if a filament is made of many very-high purity nanotubes, wherever there is an defect and therefore weak point at one point in the tube, all of the other tubes might be perfect near that point, ?preventing failure there.

Wtf mate. Your channel is much more worth it. This editions, are AWESOME. I love them, and you explain all with clarity and order. It's profesional, keep it up mate. I cant figure out why youre having such a low number of visits.

"IGNORING SCIENCE everything's possible"

@tarayaofelix7210

4 жыл бұрын

Lmao

@Eudjier

2 жыл бұрын

Lol

36000km elevator : irrealistic continental bridges, heavy elevators in mines or skyscrapers : still possible

@cosmic_gate476

4 жыл бұрын

Wouldn't be financially feasible for a long long time. At least as a space elevator it's a special project reducing the cost to go to space. As general infrastructure it's just a filthy expensive safety measure

@MuscarV2

4 жыл бұрын

Yeah, because skyscrapers and mineshafts get nowhere close to 36000km. You really didn't think a lot before writing that, I hope.

@FlamingToaster

4 жыл бұрын

Well, it was the same engineering that allowed us to build those heavy elevators in mines or skyscrapers that says it's rather improbable to build a space elevator, so yeah. Besides, my guess it that when we'll develop better materials instead of building space elevators we'll build better rockets/spaceplanes. But hey, who knows.

@IronMan-fi3xz

4 жыл бұрын

Marcus Lindgren 500 years ago people thought skyscrapers won't be possible, too.

@FlamingToaster

4 жыл бұрын

@@IronMan-fi3xz possible =/= economically feasible

I wonder if chiral nanotubes with regularized defects could create super elastics without the use of rubber. 🤔

@UncleKennysPlace

4 жыл бұрын

Probably about zed elongation before failure.

@annoyed707

4 жыл бұрын

If the defects are regularized, are they still defects?

@Nellosphere

3 жыл бұрын

Where's Peter Parker when you need him? !!GO WEB GO!! 🤟 🕷️🕸️

"sits in his room in the 70's"...sits typing at a computer, what?

@MouseGoat

4 жыл бұрын

He was a true Sci-fi writer after all :P a head of his time.

@MuscarV2

4 жыл бұрын

@@MouseGoat Very true, and great!

@daos3300

4 жыл бұрын

@@MouseGoat so ahead of his time he had an akira poster a decade before the film came out

Eh, I'll stick to my orbital rings and atlas towers.

@mrspeigle1

4 жыл бұрын

I think a launch Loop is a much more feasible idea in the short-term. Orbital rings are a great idea , but the industrial base required to even contemplate building one would require at least a century of explosive growth.

@petercarioscia9189

4 жыл бұрын

@@mrspeigle1 we're in the middle of a century of explosive growth. Some futurists thinks we'll gain 200x our current advancement in the next century.

@DreamskyDance

4 жыл бұрын

..any Issac Arthur SFIA viewers here ? ;)

@MkeKen67

4 жыл бұрын

"You will get nothing, and like it!"

Seems to me like we're still at a very primitive level in terms of building nanotubes, trying to squeeze out order from highly random chemical bulk processes. Seems to me the only way we will ever get perfect nanotubes of any significant length will be by assembling them with nano machines which would act in some way similar to how ribosomes assemble proteins. We will of course first need to build the nano machines and that might even be done through the route of bio-engineering by modifying existing biological machinery rather than starting from scratch. With all that however there is still the problem of defects forming after manufacture so there will always have to be an allowance made for defects no matter how perfect it was originally. Such defects will inevitably be caused by ionizing radiation from the carbon 14 present as part of the nanotube material as well as more significantly external radiation, which in space is no trivial amount.

@danielculver2209

2 жыл бұрын

Human cells have something like 6ft of DNA each, and they can replicate over the course of a few hours in some cases. So there's a precedent for low-defect high-speed polymerization. Just need to find the right substrate and engineer the right enzyme(s)

@GaspardDSM

2 жыл бұрын

@@danielculver2209 Do we talk about the 36000km of nanotubes needed ? at a rate of 4 meters/ hour we should wait a thousand year to generate one continuous strand. The real question would rather be "how to you merge 2 strands perfectly ? " ....

@danielculver2209

2 жыл бұрын

@@GaspardDSM Yep ligases are the enzymes that do that. Twisting the fibers into twine would be another solution. After a certain length and number of twists friction between fibers is stronger than the fibers themselves

You make amazing high quality and very informative videos. You should be up there with the large educational channels

2:48 I'm very very annoyed seeing earth spinning backwards......

@jackhousser2817

3 жыл бұрын

I’m very annoyed seeing earth round

@Subject Zero Science I recently found this channel and I am blown away!!! You have amazing production quality, exciting topics in science, and you are a great narrator. Thank you for your channel

This parameter tuning smells like a job for an evolutionary algorithm or other machine learning technique.

Correct balance of humor, art, science, and wishful thinking. Your time and effort is much appreciated. Please continue to keep it casual like this. Feels like having a long discussion with an old friend over tasty drinks and snacks.

So imperfect carbon nanotube Can’t make space elevators Guess we need to wait for nanobots/nanomachine Or composite carbon nanotube of some kind

@blinded6502

4 жыл бұрын

Maybe in the late future carbon nanotubes will be made by synthetic lifeforms. For example, a single nanotube will be assembled from billions of protein monomers, which are then checked for imperfections by chemical mechanisms, that walk along the nanotube strand and replace irregular ones with those swimming around. And later a yet another mechanism cuts out all protein parts, finishing the strand. Or something like that.

@spaceman6463

4 жыл бұрын

Blinded That’s why I put nanobots/nanomachines my dude

@ExtantFrodo2

4 жыл бұрын

@@blinded6502 Do you remember what happened when some life form learned how to incorporate Calcium to make hard bits like bone? Hint, the Cambrian explosion. The advent of "Hard bits" was such a phenomenal advantage giver that virtually all offspring possessing this capability were guaranteed survival. There were no problems for the 3 headed monsters, or the gnarled & twisted of limb, torso or jaw. So long as there was room to evade better equipped attackers, successful breeding of virtually every sort of variation was assured. Events like that are rare.

@benjaminjordan2330

4 жыл бұрын

You're way wrong about this lol

@blinded6502

4 жыл бұрын

​@@ExtantFrodo2 Just add some unnatural monomers to DNA, so that it can successfully replicate only within lab dish. Problem solved.

Fabulous channel that I have just discovered... love the content. Subscribed! :D

Keep in mind there will be an astronomically large 'wobbly bridge' effect. You need strength + rigidity or a means to anchor it down properly.

I knew 1 and 3 arrangements existed for octagons but I never knew their name before. Thanks for teaching me something new. Also, you have a new subscriber because science is cool.

Again great quality videos. I am a long-time blender user and would love to know how you do all the text animation and FX? is that still blender?

In lesser gravity wells like the Moon or Titan these cables could really work and not be unfeasibly long.

@berserkasaurusrex4233

4 жыл бұрын

You can use steel alloy in many non-Earth cases, or spectra/dyneema materials, and avoid the nanotube step entirely.

@c.j.3404

3 жыл бұрын

Hell we have material that could make a space elevator on the moon if we wanted.

That AKIRA poster won me over. Subbed for life. Yes i also enjoyed the video and it content. Keep them coming. Cheers. :D

Great video! I loved the reference to Cave Johnson from Portal at the end haha

I think another important strength aspect would be how you weave the tubes together to make fibres. Or stack them to make solids?

@SubjectZeroScience

4 жыл бұрын

The problem so far is to make large quantities to make the fibers. i do think that fibers will compensate for the "individual" nanotube problem.

@pattheplanter

4 жыл бұрын

@@SubjectZeroScience Aren't graphene and carbon nanotubes pretty much frictionless? Any attempt to make covalent bonds between the tubes to keep them together will reduce the tensile strength.

Forget space elevator, embrace orbital rings. Thanks for the vid.

WOW! GREAT I formation. Thank you!

2:40 : One of my pet peeves is depictions of the Earth rotating the wrong way. It wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t happening in science videos.

@NelsonsWings

4 жыл бұрын

LOL I taught my daughter at an early age " never forget, counterclockwise, north"

@peppermintmiso4341

4 жыл бұрын

Maybe that wasn't Earth, -instead, it's Kerbin- . I mean, only the South pole has solid land directly at the pole, and if that's North still, it's connecting Russia/Siberia to Greenland and America~ But if that _is_ Earth, then yes I am as irritated

@dontanton7775

3 жыл бұрын

It wasn't rotating, the camera was :P :P :P

We still ship almost everything via cargo ship, freight train, and semi truck despite having the option to fly. If we built a few space elevators, people would still fly in rockets but nearly all cargo would go by elevator.

Although the monolog was for the most part well understandable, I would like to suggest that the speaker pay attention to the pronunciation of the word "attributed". When I played the model pronunciations from dict.cc, all but the one from an Indian lady were as I would expect and consistent with the pronunciations given in print dictionaries of British and American English. The bit difficulty is how the word is used, as verb or noun. The verb has the emphasis on the second syllable, whereas the noun is emphasized on the first syllable.

Great video as always!

You are my new favorite channel

thanks bro! very good imagery again

Hey, just subscribed! Do you do your own animations? And if yes, nice!

And then a single cosmic ray will ruin one carbon atom and collapse the elevator

@vrilginitymaxxer

4 жыл бұрын

Crap

@dillmon1

4 жыл бұрын

Or sadly an entire van allen belt full of charged particles :(

@firedrive45

3 жыл бұрын

@@dillmon1 you can ground or charge the elevator so that repulsion occurs.

Sorry if this is a dumb question. What if you have 2 concentric carbon nanotubes which are both chiral, but with opposite chiralities? Would the weaknesses caused by the chiralities partially cancel out?

And if it works once - how long will that totally unprotected cable hold when a heavy payload runs up with 400mph ? Any protection would be a lot weight and each ride is a lot of mechanical stress.

@pattheplanter

4 жыл бұрын

They would need something for the payload to attach to the cable to move it up and down, nanotubes are slippery as graphite. Attaching any kind of grippy surface will add to the load. A grippy surface that doesn't wear away under vehicles of several tonnes at 400mph? Metallic cores for electromagnets? Really heavy over thousands of km. You would need some kind of cable ties to keep all the independent carbon nanotubes together. If you can make a nanotube 35,000 km long. If you can't then you also need some sort of anchor at both ends of each nanotube linking it to...other nanotubes? Those connections are going to have to have the strength of a nanotube. Then you have the problems of waves in the cable. I believe the strength here is for tensile strength under perfect conditions. What happens when you have shear forces? Also constant radiation bombardment of the nanotube cable knocking atoms out of their neatly perfect carbon lattice. How many can they lose before the whole thing snaps? Not to mention all the space junk we have left up there. So, not happening on my planet, thankfully.

@mrspeigle1

4 жыл бұрын

Space elevators are pleb tier megastructures, skyhooks and launch Loops are much better ideas at least until we get the orbital industry in place to contemplate building orbital rings.

@werewolf4358

4 жыл бұрын

@@mrspeigle1 SFIA? I see you have Patrician tastes.

@mrspeigle1

4 жыл бұрын

@@werewolf4358 one of my favorite podcasts, though oddly enough I was introduced to sfia through the concept of skyhooks not the other way around. Read about the concept in a Sci-Fi book got curious and went to Google.

@werewolf4358

4 жыл бұрын

@@mrspeigle1 lol. Things have a funny way of working out like that sometimes.

While you're crushing dreams you should look into actively supported structures like launch loops :P

Brilliant video. Thanks!

has anyone calculated the strength requirements of a "cable-web" shaped like an inverse Eiffel Tower,,, where out in space are multiple orbiting bases,,, which are connected by a web of cables that converge towards earth to a single elevator base??

What do you do after you make these tiny strands though? Do you twist them together like cable? Clump them together straight somehow? Seems like those shapes are important too.

@talltroll7092

4 жыл бұрын

Take a look at current carbon fibre engineering tech, such as Formula 1 cars. It can be woven into a fabric, shaped, then heated to permanently fix that shape

Just triple braid the armchair structure and put a tension gyro on the satellite and on the ground to eliminate as many Pascal's of pressure possible and reducing quick snags from various elements like high wind. Cable dampeners all the way up the ribbon to reduce sway as well. Scaling to size a strength is always the answer.

4:10 spacex fuel cost for spaceship(+superheavy) launch 1m$, near future internal cost 3m$, probably later 2m$, for 150tons cargo.

@kerbodynamicx472

4 жыл бұрын

sDdnDSiduAe4b - That is still under development

What if we connected a bunch of fans spinning around the cable to reduce the tension at elevations where air pressure can be utilized? Would that lower the threshold enough?

I'm a bit late but i've read somewhere that space elevator would allow to transport radioactive materials safely into space (this allow building a nuclear propuled spaceship that could go interstellar)

Why is armchair configuration and zigzag different? They look the same just turned 90degs. Does that really make a strength difference?

Amazing quality videos!!!

So we'll have to taper the cable a bit more... problem solved?

There is an interesting new video about skyhooks in Kurzgesagt.

Could the nanotubes be made stronger by somehow laminating sheets of different configurations together?

Does this mathematical model assume that the elevator would need to be positioned near or at the equator? Wouldn't the rotational forces nearer to the poles be more favorable? (i.e. the ice skater spinning on axis)

brilliant and superior to other vids on the topic!

Tethers may still prove very useful in boosting orbits and perhaps in getting objects to orbit, even if the classic space elevator is not a realistic option.

It looks as if they are testing strength by pulling in opposite directions. Are they able to calculate other forces to determine shear strength, etc...?

Active structures and orbital rings to support the elevator would get rid of the need for impossible strength cables and instead require impossible power production.

what about a space station in orbit that lowers a second much smaller unit down with a cable not all the way to the surface but to somewhere say a plane can dock with in mid air off load some passengers or cargo which will be pulled back up to the station in orbit ? it wouldnt have to deal with nearly as much tension right? like the plane could grab the unit dock with it and the plane itself would keep everything steady would it work ?

Thanks for the update, will you be doing any videos on carbon nanotubes and concrete, there was talk about making mega structures with carbon nanotubes reinforce concrete, I was getting sick hearing about carbon nanotubes, now you hardly hear anything about them.

@SubjectZeroScience

4 жыл бұрын

I have a list of topics that I am following but eventually I will get into that. The reason we don't hear much from them is imply on how difficult it is to make them, and whoever has a good method to make them keeps everything a secret.

Not to mention lightning strikes on the cable, and possible energy transfer between the ionosphere and the ground that could fry the cable.

An orbital ring would require ordinary materials only and its height (LEO) is a fraction of the geostationary height so the time to get there would be correspondingly less.

active support based space elevators can still be construed on Earth also know as an atlas pillar with it's top above the equator.

Nest the tubes with alternating grains. You get the insane strength numbers. Good fucking luck manufacturing that though.

did you see the spool out of the test cable years ago? the voltage across it burned the test cable

Okay, but what if we use multiple tubes? Cause from what I can tell you’re basing off a singular tube, and going back to basic strings, a single string snaps easier than 3 strings braided together

It’s nice to get some appreciation round here

Ok, my question. When you move weight away from center of mass, It slows down. Like when a ice skater spins faster or slower when they move arms/legs in and out. Will these elevators not do the same to earth's rotation? Just curious and figured I'd ask here. Thanks

@c.j.3404

3 жыл бұрын

The earth is so massive that the evect would be so small as to be neglecgbule.

where will the space elevator connect from the ground to the space?

It’s not as much of a pipe dream as you might think. 35,000 km is long, but it’s not too far off from the length of all the fiber optic cables all across the planet. Moreover, carbon nanotubes aren’t “the one” thing that could make space elevators a reality. Graphene by itself could do the job, and so could diamond nanothreads, as well as boron nitrate nanotubes. Also, the travel time is a bit misleading. Yeah it would take days to climb the elevator, while it only takes a couple hours to launch a rocket, but rockets also have to wait for ideal weather conditions. Because of the massive tension on the cable, it will be extremely rigid to the point where even a hurricane couldn’t damage it. Furthermore, there’s a fundamental barrier for rocket launches that not even SpaceX can overcome. Launching larger payloads fundamentally costs more and more, and until we get fusion powered rockets, it will always be the more costly option next to an elevator ride. Finally, the most important thing to keep in mind is the promise of space elevators. Just by letting go of the cable at different lengths, you can literally launch anywhere in the solar system, no rocket fuel required.

@JM-us3fr

4 жыл бұрын

Oh I should also point out the cable doesn’t necessarily need to be made of one long continuous molecule. At Rice University, they make spools of carbon nanotube threads, but they are small centimeter long nanotubes that stick to each other via Van Der Waal’s forces. To get the amazing tensile strength promised by carbon nanotubes, you just need continuous molecules long enough so the friction between them is greater than their tensile strength. So while defects certainly weaken the tubes, you only need enough of them to maintain their structure for the cable to maintain its strength.

Can the low gravity and vacuum nature of space help make carbon nanotube manufacturing more efficient and higher quality?

Elon Musk recently told that Starship would cost SpaceX about $2,000,000 to launch. It has a 150T to LEO capacity, so about $13.33 per kilogram...

Will a space elevator work on the moon?

Just use some thrust stations spaced along the tube to relieve the stress. Cheap fuel can be pumped up the tube to power the thrusters.

6:49 whats the difference in zigzag and armchair? they look like the same thing just turned 90 degrees

What about using superconducting magnets? Then you could inject into the system as much electricity as you need to.

alternative: lower estimation for strength of carbyne equals 251 GPa

Does the concept of a Space elevator even work? Wouldn't pulling up a load up the cable slow down the orbit of the counterweight by pulling on it? Therefore you still have to spend rocket fuel to accelerate the counterweight each time

even if you got launch costs near zero, the infinite reusability with only electrical power makes it worth building one over using rocket fuel for everything.

@wpatrickw2012

4 жыл бұрын

The costs for maintenance on a space elevator structure are unknown and could turn out to be astronomical as well. We will have to know more about the materals it will be made from and their durability before we can even make a guess at those costs.

@Blackholefourspam

4 жыл бұрын

@@wpatrickw2012 My argument was mostly with fossil fuel use (hydrogen is potentially carbon neutral but is currently cheapest to source from gas extraction). Not maintenance cost, I do have my doubts about just how extreme the maintenance but that wasn't the focus of my post.

Polar vortex would make great uplift for an elevator position.

Can you also please make a video on PHA from food waste, industrial technology

that Akira poster, wow, here is my like

Graphene can also be used. What about kevlar or UMWHDPE? Dyneema is very strong and has low density, unlike nanotubes it's easy already to manufacture and relatively cheap but has low melting point.

Still sounds like its doable, just thicker, but, certainly this is morw than enough for a sky hook, which could be more useful

what about a space straw? use negative pressure from space to pull things inside the tunnel upwards then use gravity to get things down.

wait but you can still make super strong wire right?

What about 2013 study by Zhang et al. reporting tensile strength measured at up to 120 GPa? ("Growth of Half-Meter Long Carbon Nanotubes Based on Schulz-Flory Distribution")

Also what about new materials like that aluminum impregnated glass? Maybe making fiber glass rope from such a material would be stronger? Too bad you can’t swap compressive strength for tensile.

You referenced graphine a few times but I whish you eould have extrapolated on it. Graphing has a specific surface area thats about 2.6 times that of carbon nanotubes, and has a theorized tensile strength of up to 130GPa and a stiffness of up to 1TPa. Its also said to be self repairing if carbon molecules are introduced to the damaged area.

Apparently, 1-atom thick carbon chains (-C≡C-C≡C-, etc., or possibly =C=C=C=, etc.) have been grown inside carbon nanotubes. I wonder if that could be used to increase tensile strength. Obviously, these chains are even more sensitive to impurities than carbon nanotubes, but maybe it could still help with tethers made of lots of tubes with the defects at different points.

doesn't seem too bad there are a lot of common misconceptions both about space elevators and about material strength the thing is oyu could hypothetically make a cabe using a relatively weak material as long as you taper it making it thinner at the ends and thickest at geostationary orbit the problem is that htis would have to be exponential and with a normal material the diameter at geostationary orbit yo uget would be absolutely insane so it would no longer behave like a rope which would make things even worse but with nanotubes even if they aren't quite up to the ideal strength one might hope for it's feasible if you taper the wire correctly - the biggest problem seems to be how to actually turn these into a workable material, probably by working them into a compound

All about the sky hooks mate

You make great videos and horrendously under subscribed.

How did you come up with the speed of delivery of a space elevator? I'm thinking a rail gun style propulsion system could go at least as fast as a rocket. Am I wrong?

@MkeKen67

4 жыл бұрын

I am assuming not as much lift force as a rocket engine. Need a lot of "oomph" to overcome earth's gravity. Also, something going as fast as a rocket would break the cable.

I know CNT's and graphene are basically the same thing and prone to the same defects but if you tightly rolled graphene in a loop with so many layers that it ended up being a couple centimeters thick and then made a chain out of these loops, how would the strength compare?

@OldGamerNoob

4 жыл бұрын

...and I know it would take years to grow each ring at current rates but at least it would facilitate the tapering a space elevator needs.

A really well animated video! Anyway, just had some thoughts to share. (I'm finishing up a thesis about artificial muscles and part of it has to do with carbon nanotubes) Carbon nanotube yarns have been producible since 2004 but aren't talked about very much which surprises me, it was the beginning of a pure CNT thread (so it keeps its mechanical strength as well as thermal/electrical conductivity, where other polymer/CNT composite threads could not). You can make the sheet of CNTs like you showed in the video, but also you can just pull from one side of this sheet, and while twisting it, you can make a yarn. just a square cm can make something like 2m of yarn or something like that. So now, the cross section of this small yarn that is maybe 3 microns has hundreds of thousands of carbon nanotubes. More tubes = more load, it would be interesting to see how plying together the yarn many times over would do to its strength. So instead of purely depending on intramolecular bonds of carbon, there are many tubes applying friction forces to each other as well (Zhang et al. 2004, 2011). Maybe if clever manufacturing is used, like some kind of continuous CVD production with yarn drawing, huge thick ropes of CNTs can be made and space elevators can be a real thing :)

@DmitrySabFo

3 жыл бұрын

Space elevator requires too much material to build, not talking about quality of this material and ability of all world to unite to build that project. What is more realistic is building huge space station with artificial gravity and facilities to build space ships inside this station. Humanity need to collect materials from asteroids and other space objects and return to the station to turn materials into more ships and more projects. At this point, everything will be self sustainable, no need to deliver materials and fuel to the space Yes, of course it will require many years to complete But this is more realistic way. After that we might be able to find better materials to make space elevators or it's amount. (Sorry if my English is not the best, not my natural language)

Little to incentive at all? Energyefficiency? Do you speak it?

Need special physical processing of these materials. To increase strength.

5:43 What is Carob fiber reinforced plastic... :D :D

@SubjectZeroScience

4 жыл бұрын

That is a typo. My apologies. Its carbon!

Just love the Arthur C Clark scenario shown with an Akira Poster from 1990, hanging on the wall... Though it's supposed story hails back to the feudal times of Japan and isn't high tech...