Transmat World: The Environmental Advantage of a Space Elevator

image courtesy Obayashi Corporation

Climate change is big. It’s bad. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. It’s going to be a rough few hundred, maybe few thousand, years for humanity. The short term view is not encouraging. The fossil fuel energy companies are going to fight tooth and claw to keep selling combustibles. The long term view is more optimistic. As the adverse affects of climate change begin to multiply and intensify, naysayers will be silenced, and social pressure will mandate change. Will it be enough soon enough? Hard to say. If mankind ever gets this CO2 problem under control, we will be looking at different ways to do business that protects the Earth in a more proactive manner, keeping the environment as ideal for life, all life, as possible.

A space elevator may be the key technology for mankind to have it’s cake and eat it, too while the Earth’s climate rebalances. With a space elevator, all the nasty industrial processes that require a lot of energy and cause a lot of pollution could take place in orbit around the Earth. The end products of those orbital industries could then be more easily and cheaply transported to Earth via the space elevator.

A space elevator could also preserve planetary resources. The materials needed for these myriad industrial processes may not even need to come from the surface of the planet. Most can be found in the asteroids or on the Moon. Need fuel? Load up an orbital tanker from a methane lake on Titan, one of the moons of Jupiter. Need water. Find an asteroid made of water and mine it. It is estimated half the water in the oceans came from a bombardment of water-bearing asteroids. Need metal? Nickel-iron asteroids are plentiful. Need energy? Build focusing mirrors for heat and solar panels for electricity.

How does a space elevator work? Take a piece of string with a weight on one end. Pick the string up by the weightless end and spin around until the weight is straight out from your body. A ladybug makes an amazing landing on the string and starts walking out the string to the counterweight. You are the Earth, the string is the elevator cable or tether, the weight is the counterweight, and the ladybug is the car that goes up and down the cable. It’s not a perfect analogy, but it gives a good idea of what and where the major parts are. The counterweight would be about 60,000 to 90,000 miles up from the Earth’s surface. The center of mass of the whole thing should be at geosynchronous orbit, about 22,000 miles up. Now quit spinning and sit down because you’re gonna be dizzy.

Currently, carbon nanotubes are in the running to be the material that can withstand the tremendous stresses of this application. Someone just has to figure out how to make a 60,000 mile long ribbon of the stuff with no imperfections. Meteoroids and space debris are a major problem. Protective measures must be implemented. A major clean-up of our space debris may be in order before we invest in such a mega-project as the space elevator.

With the polluting industries moved to orbit, imagine the Earth as a giant natural park. Yes, we’ll live here, but not as obtrusively as before. One counterintuitive idea would be a further consolidation of humanity into supercities. Megalithic structures would house humanity. Supercities could eliminate untold millions of miles of transportation because everything and everyone is so close. Walking would be the preferred mode of transportation along with personal electric scooters and elevators.

It would free up a lot of land for planting trees and other plants to sequester CO2. Meat would be grown or fabricated in a lab. Multistory greenhouses would grow our vegetables and grains. Supercities would be connected by high speed underground subways like Hyperloop. Other means of transportation will be electric drones and hybrid airships that can flip between heavier and lighter-than-air modes of flight.

I know what you’re thinking. This is all such pie-in-the-sky fantasy stuff with no connection to reality. Fifty years ago, so was AI, GPS, autonomous vehicles, internet, and personal computers. The future looks bright. If we can just get there. Let us hope our immediate future holds in store political allies to humanity and the planet instead of what we have now.

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