Space Elevator

Most engineers would bring up a lot more issues than just finding a strong cable. Also, most attempts with e.g. carbon nanotubes have been abandoned ages ago https://www.newscientist.com/article/2093356-carbon-nanotube....

- We don't have a good ascent mechanism other than rockets - and then we might just use rockets without building an elevator. - We don't have a good (and safe) descent mechanism. - Maintenance? Protection from space debris? Protection from oscillations? Ground-protection if the elevator collapses?

This is dyson-sphere level of fiction. We can do back-of-the-napkin calcualtions on how things would work, but the practicalities make it completely impossible or impractical.

Then again, when doing mega structures, a launch loop is more plausible.

https://www.kimstanleyrobinson.info/content/clarke

Apple's put out a staggering amount of content the last few years, I wasn't even aware this one debuted!

Once you have the cable up, you can grab onto it and pull yourself up.

After the first book, he then goes to explore all the questions that it brought up. The question of identity (to me) seems like the most reoccurring question.

Btw, there's a new book in the series. The Shattering Peace was released in September.

In terms of hardness, it probably on par with Expanse, so mostly technobabble with the magical tech only used when it's convenient for the plot. The abuse of "psychohistory" is particularly egregious. There's so many scenes where it's visualized a hologram of scribbles and they zoom in on more squiggles while divining the future.

But again it's pretty, so if you're okay with drama in space, it's maybe a 8/10.

For example, each short story almost completely changes the cast (of course, with some descendants of characters appearing occasionally), as befits a saga that spans centuries. No producer was willing to run with that (as they didn't believe the audience smart enough to follow it would be big enough for the show to make a profit), so they introduced cryonics, clones, sorta-AIs (including robots out of their original context) to have some sort of continuing cast.

Also, the books have a quaint 1940s (NOT 1950s as people usually say it) atmosphere, with excitement about "atomic" energy (changed to "nuclear" in the 1950s publication), distant descendents of the slide rule, and generally weird-sounding math and science, that the show totally drops in favor of a "contemporary" feel.

And btw, the space elevator scene is lifted from Brin's Foundation's Triumph where it is described as a "future" event, part of Trantor's fall, predicted by Seldon's early team and trickled down to the general population.

My friends who like sci-fi enjoyed it.

It is regardless very striking and high budget.

I wish directors were brave enough to kill off characters if it serves the plot. I get that there's IRL reasons that make it difficult (like contracts, scheduling, etc) but each new season accumulates more subplots to the point it's like a 30 minute episode is really a compilation of 3x 10-minute shows.

This bugs me in multiple-protagonist books too. Just feels like an excuse to pad the page count with introductions and cliff hangers every POV switch.

I think separated from that there's a good enough show in there.

He did. The elevator music!

What's the best way to pull yourself directly vertical along a cable for 22,000 miles?

What's the best way to descend 22,000 miles quickly, but also with a braking mechanism that isn't going to require a heat shield?

Some sort of slow cable car going at 10mph even is going to take 2200 hours... 1000mph is going to take 22 hours still. That's a full day to orbit even going REALLY fast. And getting up to 1000mph vertically, for a sustained 22 hours... that's not an easy feat.

And if the goal is just to get up past the karman line and use the elevator as a stage 1 for a rocket launch and detaching from the elevator while suborbital is fine, then it's a one way trip, and still need to re-enter the old fashion way.

The scale of space makes all of the problems far more complicated (edit: not just the cable strength issue, but traversing the cable)

Brother Dawn: How often do we make this choice?

Demerzel: You always make this choice.

    The next day’s hearings were entirely different. Hari Seldon and Gaal Dornick were alone with the Commission. They were seated at a table together, with scarcely a separation between the five judges and the two accused. They were even offered cigars from a box of iridescent plastic which had the appearance of water, endlessly flowing. The eyes were fooled into seeing the motion although the fingers reported it to be hard and dry.

In a recent re-reading of the series, I started having difficult with it in Second Foundation... and forced myself to finish Foundation's Edge. The amount of psionic ability and the... for lack of a better word "preaching" with the monologues was very much a science fiction of a different time.

Foundation (the TV series) had to do updates for modern audiences and media. I'm not sure if trying to remain perfectly faithful to the books would represent them well.

Foundation is a soft sci-fi about interactions between individuals and history and society. Trying to maintain the incidental harder parts of the written works that modern audiences expect to be somewhat consistent of far future technology with the 1950s lens on them would be quaint and a bit off-putting to people expecting future tech.

    He threw his cigar away and looked up at the outstretched Galaxy. “Back to oil and coal, are they?” he murmured—and what the rest of his thoughts were he kept to himself.

What at joy it'd be to fully experience life, not just a sanitized productized version, and have the safety net of perfect medicine to cure what ails ya.

That "last mile" bit is going to entail independent propulsion anyway. Getting to the altitude if the ISS is a mere 10 hour trip at a sedately 40kph which isn't unpleasant even for humans, but the ISS orbits at nearly 29000kph (as will you if you let go of the space elevator at that altitude) and the velocities are only half as scary at the far end, so your rendezvous anywhere other than one specific point in geo is going to be complicated. But you've saved the fuel costs of escaping the earth's atmosphere that's rather significantly more than the fuel costs of other bits of your satellite mission, including reentry. (At least until the costs of building and maintaining and protecting the elevator are factored in, but who knows what unobtanium costs?)

(Translation: yes, once as a kid).

1.08321×10¹² km³ is the volume of Earth, feasibility study done! Implement!

Projects are massively expensive, including a lot spent on "looking expensive", but the writing cannot be as expertly crafted because the high expense means upper management craves purpose and control and meddles with things, and the giant "target" audience means you can't do anything interesting.

Surface area is 5x10^8 km^2. So it it 'only' the first ~2m of the crust (~6m if you don't count ocean).

Doesn't the teather have a constant (24 hour) rotational period at every elevation? That is significantly slower than the ISS