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Old Posted Aug 26, 2018, 6:05 PM
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What Would It Take to Build a Tower as High as Outer Space?

What Would It Take to Build a Tower as High as Outer Space?


Aug 26 2018

By Sean Sun and Dan Popescu

Read More: https://singularityhub.com/2018/08/2...as-outer-space

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It turns out that biological design, equipped with around 3.8 billion years of experience, might help solve this puzzle. Before the age of materials science, engineers had to look to nature for creative tricks to help them overcome the restrictions of their materials. Classical civilizations, for example, souped their war machines with twisted tendons made from animal hides, which could extend and snap back to launch projectiles at the enemy.

- This led to a sub-discipline known as “reliability engineering.” Designers started to make structures that were much stronger than the maximum possible load they needed to bear—which meant the stress on the materials stayed within a range where the probability of breakage was very low. — Once structures turn into megastructures, though, calculations show that this risk-averse approach places a cap on their size. Megastructures necessarily push materials to their limits, and remove the luxury of weathering comfortable levels of stress.

- However, neither the bones nor tendons in our bodies enjoy this luxury. In fact, they’re often compressed and stretched well beyond the point at which their underlying substances might be expected to break. Yet these components of human bodies are still much more ‘reliable’ than their sheer material strength would suggest. — For example, merely running can push the Achilles’ tendon to over 75 percent of its ultimate tensile strength, whereas weightlifters can experience stresses of over 90 percent of the strength of their lumbar spines, when they are hefting hundreds of kilograms.

- How does biology handle these loads? The answer is that our bodies constantly repair and recycle their materials. In tendons, collagen fibers are replaced in such a way that, while some are damaged, the overall tendon is safe. This constant self-repair is efficient and inexpensive, and can change based on the load. Indeed, all structures and cells in our bodies are in constant turnover; it’s estimated that almost 98 percent of the atoms in the human body are replaced every year.

- We recently applied this self-repair paradigm to see whether it’s possible to build a reliable space elevator with available materials. A common proposed design features a 91,000 km-long cable (called a tether), extending out from the equator and balanced by a counterweight in space. The tether would consist of bundles of parallel fibers, similar to collagen fibers in tendons or osteons in bones, but made from Kevlar, a material found in bullet-proof and knife-proof vests.

- Using sensors and artificially intelligent software, it would be possible to model the whole tether mathematically so as to predict when, where and how the fibers would break. And when they did, speedy robotic climbers patrolling up and down the tether would replace them, adjusting the rate of maintenance and repair as needed—mimicking the sensitivity of biological processes. Despite operating at very high stress compared to what materials can sustain, we showed this structure would be reliable and would not demand exorbitant rates of replacement. Moreover, the maximum strength the material would need to possess to achieve a dependable structure was cut by an impressive 44 percent.

- This bio-inspired approach to engineering can also help structures down here on Earth, such as bridges and skyscrapers. By “challenging” our materials, and equipping systems with autonomous repair and replacement mechanisms, we can exceed current limitations while improving reliability. — To get a sense of the benefits of operating closer to the limit of tensile strength, look at a suspension bridge, involving lengths of steel rope that dip in the middle. The main hurdle to increasing the span of the bridge is that, as we use longer ropes, they become heavier and break under their own weight.

- If the rope is stretched to no more than 50 per cent of its total strength, the maximum span is about 4 km; but when stretched up to 90 per cent of its strength, the span dramatically increases to more than 7.5 km. However, ensuring the cable is safe will require steel fibers to be replaced in a fine-tuned process, just like in biological systems. — We need a new paradigm, one that focuses not only on material strength, but on systems’ inherent reconstructive capacities. We ought to look no further than the bounty of biological life around us and trust there is much to learn from the sweep of evolutionary history.

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  #2  
Old Posted Oct 31, 2018, 12:30 PM
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A space elevator cable won't be made from steel. It would have to be something like carbon mono-filament.
And like the Kim Stanley Robinson novels, I think if a space elevator is ever built, it will first be built on Mars where it is much easier to do so.
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Old Posted Nov 10, 2018, 4:17 PM
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Perhaps atop Olympus Mons where it would have a 16 mile head start.
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Old Posted Dec 28, 2018, 5:12 PM
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https://what-if.xkcd.com/94/
tl;dr A skyscraper would need about 20,000 floors to reach space.
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Old Posted Jan 18, 2019, 7:09 AM
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Its called a space elevator, and it’s on the fringe of feasible with current technology. The concept is a counterweight tethered to a station on earth, not unlike a track-and-field hammer throw. Then you could move up and down the tether. There would have to be some pretty significant advances in materials science before it’d be practicable, though. The benefits would be that it’d vastly reduce the cost of getting mass to orbit, and make large scale orbital construction a reality.
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