Fafhrd on 27/4/2014 at 19:34
Quote Posted by nicked
Essentially you need a very long cable with a counterweight in space so that the centrifugal force of the Earth's rotation keeps it up. You need super-strong, super-tensile materials to build it and be able to withstand impact from meteors and space junk, and the journey to the top would still take about 5 days at 200km per hour. But, once it was in place, you'd be able to shift stuff into space for about 5% of the cost of a rocket, and therefore make constructing more space elevators that much easier. Then what - space habitats, moon bases, etc. etc.
The other problem with this (the primary one being finding a material with enough tensile strength to stretch up to geo-synchronous orbit) is that you'd be spending a day or so in the Van Allen belts, so, without incredibly strong radiation shielding that doesn't actually exist yet, anything transported on the space elevator would be too irradiated to use.
Bulgarian_Taffer on 27/4/2014 at 22:40
I'm quite sceptical about this. Always 50 years into the future.
R Soul on 2/5/2014 at 00:21
Unless you have some expertise in the subject I think it's best to remain neutral.
henke on 1/6/2014 at 09:39
Annoying video, but cool concept!
[video=youtube;qlTA3rnpgzU]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlTA3rnpgzU[/video]
Of course there's still lots of questions, like how much will this cost? How good will the traction be compared to asphalt? Wouldn't it get dirty and stop taking in sunlight pretty fast? But love the idea nonetheless.
SubJeff on 1/6/2014 at 14:05
Quote Posted by demagogue
A mere 720,000 CPU days of work later & scientists have created a high resolution scale model of our entire universe's history, accurately predicting just the proportion of galaxies we actually see. Color me impressed.
Rumour has it (I heard it on Crate and Crowbar) that the new Elite accurately models the galaxy. Or universe or something. If you're orbiting Earth you'll see the real constellations that'd you'd see, at that time (whenever it is) and the same goes for everywhere.
demagogue on 1/6/2014 at 22:31
In one of those videos they explain that it's at the scale where it can simulate galaxy dynamics, spiraling and such. So maybe there are a few dozen or hundred pixels per galaxy, but still far from the scale you can see individual stars. The overall scale is a massive 350 million-light-year square chunk of the universe, big enough to see the big picture, small enough to still resolve individual galaxies.
What they've been saying that sounds like what you heard is that, left to its own after a few billion years of sim time, galaxies start evolving that look statistically like what we see in nature, with the right proportion of spiral galaxies, globular galaxies, etc, and their dynamics look the same. So you can find nice spiral galaxies that look like ours, though it's not exactly ours. It's not a perfect overlap, just a statistical similarity.
Actually they've already noticed a number of things that are rather different from our universe too. That's exciting because it can lead to new science beyond what we already know (since the algorithms were made out of all the leading theories). As they tweak the algorithms to be more and more accurate, they can learn new things about the universe beyond the leading theories.
henke on 5/6/2014 at 12:15
NOSCOPE KILLSHOT IRL
WATCH WHO U CALLING A GLASSHOLE
[video=youtube;itdwWvAnNx4]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itdwWvAnNx4[/video]
:D
:erm:
:D
:erm:
