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 👀

  • UnspecificGravity@piefed.social
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    19 hours ago

    Right, except that a bowling ball weights about 6kg and a tennis ball weighs about sixty grams, so we would only need to build a platform that weighs 1% of the total mass of earth.

    • GreyEyedGhost@piefed.ca
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      14 hours ago

      It needs to weigh enough that it counters the momentum/drag of the cable plus the net of whatever mass is going up. Keep in mind that cars going down add to that overall value while cars going up subtract. Also, the general opinion is for the station/anchor to be slightly above geosync so the net effect of the orbit on the station is to be pulling away from the earth (there is some wiggle room depending on how robust your earth anchor is and the mechanics of your tether with respect to tension vs. compression, but most models plan for a little net lift). In other words, you also attach to an anchor on the earth (which could just be a chunk of bedrock) to counteract that net force. Since the net force of the tether (not counting the earth tether) would be away from earth, any net loss of momentum would be regained from the earth’s spin (which happens whenever we launch a rocket right now). You could also have a spool at either end to maintain the desired tension on the tether while accounting for slight elevation changes due to net momentum loss or gain. On top of all that, the space anchor mass isn’t really dependent on the mass of the earth so much as it is on the net amount of mass being lifted or lowered to the earth and the amount of time you want to wait to return to it’s desired orbital altitude. And finally, if the tether was severed only the part whose center of gravity was below geostationary orbit would actually fall to earth - the rest would leave orbit.

        • GreyEyedGhost@piefed.ca
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          13 hours ago

          How is it a bad analogy? You seem to be treating it like a scale model, which i don’t think was the intention. Moreover, most of the effects map over fine.