this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2024
1310 points (98.6% liked)

memes

10307 readers
2053 users here now

Community rules

1. Be civilNo trolling, bigotry or other insulting / annoying behaviour

2. No politicsThis is non-politics community. For political memes please go to [email protected]

3. No recent repostsCheck for reposts when posting a meme, you can only repost after 1 month

4. No botsNo bots without the express approval of the mods or the admins

5. No Spam/AdsNo advertisements or spam. This is an instance rule and the only way to live.

Sister communities

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] brucethemoose 8 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (4 children)

What about the moon? Surely not...

Well, ultimately space elevators are the most energy efficient way to escape Earth's gravity well. And once we have one of those, mind as well build a mass driver at the top so rockets don't have to carry so much of their own mass. Then we can build a laser-based photonic sail on the other end to decelerate the cars and make them even lighter/faster, and then build track at the bottom...

Train.

What about interstellar travel?

Well, ultimately wormholes are way more efficient than any subluminal travel once the infrastructure to build them is in place: https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/48545a0f6352a

So we control traffic on each side carefully. In fact, we could just suspend a really strong wire on either end...

Yep. Train.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I mean, currently both space elevators and wormholes (as transportation) seem physically impossible.

If we're not sticking to the realm of our current understanding of physics, then that opens the doors for techbros too, because we're in the realm of speculative fiction and things can be however we say they are.

[–] brucethemoose 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

They're physically possible, just massive engineering challenges. Read Orion's Arm's overview, it's largely based on current known physics.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

For space elevators, to the best of my knowledge, there is no known material that can withstand the forces involved. Not even CFNTs.

For wormholes, we're getting so deep into speculation that the conversation doesn't even really matter.

load more comments (1 replies)