As I understand it (see: not at all), if you leave a spaceship with no suit on, you’d get baked like Marie Curie’s ovaries from the radiation. It’s mainly our atmosphere that protects us from most of the nastiest stuff. Would a giant cable reaching from Earth all the way to a platform outside the atmosphere become dangerously-radioactive over time? And if so, would that eventually cause the entire planet to get radioactive over hundreds of years? Kinda like if the hole in the Ozone layer were replaced with a Mario pipe.

And if that is the case, maybe we could forget the elevator aspect of it and just aim for a free eternal source of radioactive energy, like a really shitty Dyson sphere 👀

  • EtherWhack@lemmy.world
    0·
    22 hours ago

    I think I read somewhere that we do have the technology to create a Dyson sphere but it would be too much of a massive undertaking time and labor-wise at our current level.

    • Ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      1·
      11 hours ago

      We have the technology to manufacture materials that could make up a Dyson Swarm. We are not even close to having the technology to make materials that would be sufficient to make a Dyson Sphere.

      What we don’t have is the resources, logistics, energy supply and manufacturing base to implement either…

    • MotoAsh@piefed.socialEnglish
      1·
      17 hours ago

      Not Dyson sphere (also a sphere is literally impossible), though maybe space elevator. If we weren’t already so close to Kessler Syndrome, anyways…

    • CarbonatedPastaSauce@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      20 hours ago

      We do not. We can’t even move solar energy from earth orbit down to earth at any scale that would be economically viable or really even useful.

      We lack the material science to build something that large but still light enough to be physically stable AND somehow collect and transmit energy.

      We also lack the technology to stop it from being destroyed by space debris even if we could somehow build it.

      • GreyEyedGhost@piefed.caEnglish
        2·
        13 hours ago

        There isn’t a requirement for a Dyson shell to transmit energy. You could just envelope the sun in habitats that use the energy they collect locally and that would meet the criteria of a Dyson shell (and a K2 civilization).

          • GreyEyedGhost@piefed.caEnglish
            1·
            11 hours ago

            It requires more material and financial resources, but isn’t necessarily harder. Transmitting energy effectively to reduce heat, or managing the excess heat starts running into some pretty tough limits of physics. Most of the issues with spinning habitats are engineering problems within the capabilities of our current technology level and materials science. It’s just super expensive and has terrible ROI for now.