buylotrogold

I haven't hung out in this forum for a while, but I get the general impression that here and in the science fiction community the general concept of space hooks is to get people and things out of Earth's gravity well. I think that at least now, upward-mobility is a much less important issue then getting stuff from space down to Earth. In the near future, the promise of space is that we can move mining, manufacturing, and perhaps agriculture out of the fragile Earth ecology and in to a vacuum which is littered with rich mineral resources. If it were only economical to do so, we could use Von Neumann (sp?) devices with only a little human labor to create vast mining, smelting, processing, manufacturing, etc. factories on barren asteroids and send a stream of nearly-finished products down to the planet. Eventually, perhaps we could also send down both food products and completely finished consumer/business products of all kinds. (Question: can you make plastics without organic matter? Even if not, _meta_l derived this way would be practically free, so plastics may not be too important.) This would remove a vast portion of the impact of human population on our environment and also give a great boost toward moving our economy from a material basis to an information-basis. Then... once we have languished in material abundance and cultural wealth for a while... then we could start sending full human colonies out to join and expand beyond the working colonies around the manufacturing operations. Such a course of action would require a fairly large amount of lifting of people and things into space, but not really a great deal. An orbital elevator simply would not be economical for that purpose. But... and here's my point... building an elevator that only goes down should be substantially cheaper and safer then a bidirectional one. In fact, I'm not sure an elevator would even be necessary, if we could reliably and safely drop packages. The point is, a relitively low-cost mechanism for getting stuff from space to Earth would make space-_base_d manufacturing, etc. much more economical and thus more likely. If we did develop an elevator that only goes down it would really only need to serve two functions: first it would need to guide the drop-packages to their proper destinations, and second it would need to break their fall. It would be preferable to break the fall continuously during the drop instead of the at the end so that packages wouldn't need to be hardened against acceleration and so that more precious cargo could be sent. One primitive idea (feel free to come up with something better) would be to _link_ a series of rings with sturdy, light-weight cable. Each ring would have a simple braking mechanism for slowing falling packages. The rings would be buoyant and would float at their proper position in the atmosphere; also, they would be set to release their upper cable if they encounter significant force. That way, each ring would hold up it's own weight and the weight of the cable connecting it to the ring below, but would break off when duressed. If anything breaks the elevator, it would only knock out a few rings. Hopefully, the rest of the elevator would remain basically in-place, since the rings will still be floating. Additionally, repairing it would only require replacing the missing rings and cables. Problems with that idea include: atmospheric storms, the stress of the braking on the rings and cables, what happens if the elevator breaks while a package is coming down, and probably a million other things I haven't thought of. But I'm not trying to advocate that elevator idea as much as encourage the community to consider the problem of only getting stuff down from space and not up to it. I think this would be a much more economical way to begin our move to space and thus much more likely to succeed. I would love to see us have a way to get people into space for free, but I think a down-elevator is the most logical way to approach that goal. P.S. Science fiction note: this argument may also imply that in the development any civilization's space-faring age, they might develop a down-elevator fairly early and might take much longer to build a two-way one. Just something to consider if you're writing about such a thing.  Toe!  ( `-/ )_.-' ``-._        Is Vegetarianism a moral imperative?        . . `; -._    )-;-,_`)  Of course it is!  For details, see:         (v_,)'  _  )`-.  ``-'  http://www.erols.com/epastore/veg/        _.- _..-_/ / ((.'                 ((,.-'   ((,/   remove SPAM from my address to reply to my posts