this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2023
212 points (93.1% liked)
Technology
59594 readers
4346 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Yes, we have the theory of what is required to build one but every material we have (including graphene and carbon nanotubes) is about 2-3 orders of magnitude below the tensile strength that is required for a space elevator on earth. Add in the fact that the longest graphene and carbon nanotube we can currently produce is in the mm range and we need it to be ~50,000 km and perfect at the atomic level we would be at best decades away from production if they could be used.
Ironically the best place for us to begin is in space.
Building space elevator on the moon is much, much easier (1/6 G and no atmosphere) and Mars is also a much easier proposition than on earth (1/3 G and 1/1000th the atmospheric pressure).
I fully expect that if humans ever build space elevators the first one will not be on earth.