I’ve been reading about this subject but I find it difficult to understand because of the large amount of opinions out there about how it would work and why we aren’t building it right now if our actual technology is enough to do it, also because it would be a way to get rid of greenhouse gases apart from the different applications to our plans to space exploration.
In: Engineering
With current technology, it would not work. Such elevator would need one or more insanely long cables that were also insanely strong, yet stretch (because wind exists) and pull and so on.
Anything even close to a candidate for the material is incredibly dense and heavy (or even radioactive), thus it’s not good. Usually too brittle as well. Of materials that are strong AND light, and we could consider – like carbon nanotubes, graphene etc, we rarely use even more “grounded” things, because they’re very difficult and expensive to produce. And even then, we’d probably need copper wires in this thing to carry electricity, and copper simply isn’t rubber.
Space elevator is a sci-fi concept and we’re nowhere building one anytime soon.
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