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 👀

  • FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.websiteEnglish
    0·
    23 hours ago

    The trick with a space elevator is that the cable needs to be very thin. The material needs to be strong. That’s just two reasons why we’re still far from putting that to any real use.

    I don’t think having a small line through our atmosphere will slowly poison us. The extra radiation that would make it through is probably a rounding error. The material would have to be such that it doesn’t attract radiation. And even if we discovered that this could be a problem, if we have become smart enough to build this space elevator, we’ll probably be smart enough to figure out a way to filter it out.