Invention of writing as an intermediary of communication --
Humanity has thrived where they have chosen to work harmoniously
to increase the resourse base, instead of fight over who gets
what's left now. Creating agriculture to cope with depletion of
hunter-gatherer resource depletion. Building railroads across
the continent to cope with limits of hoorse-drawn wagons and withering
long cattle drives. These have required major shifts in thinking,
departure from the old ways; for example, changing from hunting
& gathering in the forest (a limited supply and in competition
with other forest creatures needing the food), to staking out
ssome land, observing how plants reproduce and grow, and deliberately
assisting their planting and growth for a super-abudant harvest.
Learning about the nature of the surroundings, and working to
change those surrounds so as to thrive better... more importantly
choosing to attempt to do this instead of schoosing to fight over
(or just grab) the remains of as-found resources.
Currently humanity is faced with that recurring old problem againl
this time on a worldwide scale, thriving primarily because of
energy from fossil fuels to perform labor of incrasingly sphisticated
type, from propelling cars to the workplace, to providing energy
to make and operate personal lapto[p computers, all enabled by
huge consumption of enery stored int the ground, put there by
forests some 400 million years ago, long before the dinosaurs,
and consuming this enery stores at an ever increasong rate, now
consuming eacy year the energy it took nature tmore than a millions
years to store there. People who are infants now will be confronted
in thieir prime of life with the major depletion of those ancient
petrochemical energy stores... what then? Do we adults care, do
we have the responsibility to prepare for their future thriving?
Some cry "overpopulation!" and proclaim a need to immensely cut
back the population and lifesytyle to that before oil was discovered...
or let "nature" do the depopulation activity. Animals will fight
over the last scraps of food, over who has access to the hunting
range.
People thrive by choosing to harmoniously function together to
increase the resource base for all to access. Humainity has learned
much of the nature of the vast space above the surface of the
earth, realizing that the energy source for those ancient fossill
fuel origings, sunlight, sould be gathered up in space at rates
comparable to the rates of civilization's vast energy needs, millions
of times the rate sunlight can effectively be captured on the
ground, and thereby not depriving the earth surface of it's normal
life-giving supply of sunshine while doing so. We who are adults
now could choose to work together to make this happen for those
who are now children and can't themselvesmake it happen.Finding
a way to build and operate the immense solar eletric power sations
in high earth orbit, may be the way todo it.
Using conventional rocket propulsion to lift the mmaterials from
the ground would be so energy-consumptive that it is prohibitive;
building an infrastructure on the moon or asteroids as materials
resource would take foar longer than we have to do it before our
now-abundant fossil fuels supply is mostly depleted. As it is
, the ellusive fusion power or even "free energy" techniques might
somehow happen, but more likely is that nations will play the
game of "whoever has the last fossil fuels wins the game."
This website is to point out that there is another option, not
obvious at all to the contemporary population, a potential transportation
technology appropriate to the need to have worldwide energy supplied
that far exceeds the preent-day rate of energy concsumption fromn
fossil fuels, with a 20 or 30 year time frame, just in time to
take over from fossil fuels last reserves. Such a transportation
system, with thousands of times the efficiency and capacity of
rocket-propelled transportation systems, even hundreds of times
the capacity and efficiency of geosync anchored tether transportation
systems, has been in sight for the past 14 years or so yet is
still being ignored and suppressed by those capable of manifesting
it for humanity; such ills as (mid p 4 20030421) and corporate
greed need to be overcome to get past that blockade and get to
work on this urgent massive task... this challenge to humanity
seems greater than the technologic al challenges to achieve the
task.
This writer is more skilled at adressing the technological requireents
than addressing those social ills, so the technology involved
is to be focused upon here; humanity thrives wheere it overcomes
those ills and achieves through cooperating, wither with, or without,
this author.
The integrated technology for such a transportation system exists
already and can be found (top line p 5 20030421) , or can re-explore
the task from its basics now and see what develops. The energy (work) given to construction material mass in the process
of lifting it up from the ground and placing it in geostationary
earth orbit , travelling at 2626 m/s (0.96 kWhr/kg, 0.436 KWhr/lbm) at an
altitude of 4.23 meters (22,300 mieles above the equator) 14.76
KWhr/Kg (6.71 KWhr per pound to GEO) results in a total of about
7.15 KWhr to emplace one pound mass from earthsurface into GEO.
For reference, at a contemporary electrical power cost of ten
cents per KWhr, that is only 72 cents per pound raised to GEO
from the equatorial ground. This is an incredible miniscule amount
compared the th energy expended by a rocket-propelled launch to
get it to GEO, so the tsk potentially is quite soluble. If it
can be lifted entirely electrically, then the first solar elecgtric
power satellite could therefaer provide the energy for the transportation
system to build and maintain the hundreds more needing build,
to supply a worldwide high level long term thriving civilization
in an also-thriving worldwide ecosystem.
Converting the seemingly implausible to the obviously workable
So, let's explore the derivation of the KESTS to GEO concept from
scratch again, perhaps also finding more interesting things along
the way. Building an electrically powered catapult on the ground,
throwing mass up hrough the air with enough velocity to reach
GEO, results in meteoric ablation and immense energy loss due
to pushing through the atmosphere so fast. Maybe we could look
into that technology, using the ceramic tile technology developed
for the space shuttle re-entry heat resistance, to contgrol the
ablation, but it would not solve the energy loss by pounding through
the earth's atmsosphere. If an airless pathway could be maintained
along that catapult's missile trajectory, that part of this problem
could be solved. That vacuum-environment tathway might e achieved
dynamically to a large extent by infilling the pathway with a
continuous steam of payload material, like a water fountain maintains
a path for its fluid flow, only using a continuous solid rope
hurthlin upward from the ground, peaking at GEO where it would
be gathered for construction material conversion.Agasin, this
is a possibility that could be explored. But the task of building
and operating the many solar power satellites involves the long
term continous movement of many kinds of materials and people,
so let's look beyond this. The shape of such a continuous rope-like
stream of material from equator to GEO would be that of an Orbital
Transfer Trajectory forom R-1 (eath radius) and R=6.6 (GEO radius
above center of eareth) half of an ellipse. If this hurtling "rope"
were to continue on around the rfest of that ellipse, it would
return to its starting point on the ground, and would need to
rotate with the earth. Such an ellipse has some of the characteristics
(top fo p 7 20030421) of a "structure", perhaps it could be used
to support the lifting of other things along itself, other kinds
of payload such as people and complex material components. If
the "ropr" is a continuous kind of thing, then since its mass
crossection will need to continuously vary as its high kinetic
energy at ground level is exchanged for potential energy at higher
elevations, the "rope" could be in the form of a woven tube ,
expanding its circumference as it rises so as to maintain a constant
flow rate throughout its elliptical path, the tight weave needed
for smoother passa ge through the atmospheric portion of its pathway
, and expanding its weave higher up in the hard vacuum portion
of its path. Perhaps part of the stream of "rope" material could
be spooled up at the GEO terminal for use as raw material for
the major construction components, usin g solar powered melting
and re-shaping processes to form the structural members of the
solar power satellites , but much of the other materials would
be encased in packages inserted inside to ride the hurtling rope
for retrieval at GEO. Conceivably people could also ride up this
way, a wild ride indeed, inside a large rope-woven-tube. Precompensating
for the buffeting winds in the atmosphere much like the aforementioned
water fountain analogy is pushed around by gusts of wind. The
skin of the rope is still slidinf g through the air linearly at
some 10,000 kmps, energy loss as heat to the air and to the structure, although
remote-controllable vanes could conceivably provide lateral forces
to compensate for wind loads on the structure, acting locally
where the wind loads occur as they occur, in a position servo
control loop ... again, a new technique potentiality worthy of
further exploration. For now, pushing the concept beyond this,
consider the function of an earth-motionless outer shell enclosing
the hurtling rope-tube, providing (p8 20030421)
Resistance encountered to the KESTS to GEO project: (20030428)
