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I don't think so. Neither did he.
Some of the greatest scientific discoveries have happened due to blind luck. I'm not saying it will, but it could.
Bear in mind that nanotechnology is still in it's infancy. But it's a growing field of study.
Slightly threadrotty, but I snatched the following current uses for nanotechnology off of the New Scientist Nanotech FAQ.
Computer hard drives
Car parts and catalytic converters
Scratch- and wear-resistant paints and coatings
Sunscreens (titanium dioxide nanoparticles are transparent, yet absorb UV light at the same time) and lipsticks
Longer lasting tennis balls, and hardwearing yet lightweight tennis racquets
Metal cutting tools
Antibacterial bandages incorporating silver nanoparticles
Anti-static packaging for sensitive electronic equipment
Nanofilm-coated "self-cleaning" windows and
Stain-resistant fabrics
Which suggests to me that the industry is doing more than producing handfuls of expensive grey dust.
I'd fund mass drivers before space elavators. Less to go wrong, less Global Extinction Event if it goes wrong.
Mass drivers would be more efficient on the Moon where they wouldn't need to fight gravity so much to launch stuff. On Earth the right kind of elevator could use the energy provided by stuff coming down to boost the stuff going up.
Interesting version of an elevator on the wiki is the space fountain which incorporates concepts from both elevtors and mass drivers.
A space fountain would use pellets fired up from the ground by a mass driver, the pellets traveling through the center of a tower. These pellets would impart their kinetic energy to the tower structure via electromagnetic drag as they traveled up and again as their direction was reversed by a magnetic field at the top. Thus the structure would not be supported by the compressive strength of its materials, and could be hundreds of kilometers high. Unlike tethered space elevators (which have to be placed near the equator), a space fountain could be located at any latitude. Space fountains would require a continuous supply of power to remain aloft.
With regards to the catastrophic effects of the tether breaking, I noticed the following on the wiki too:
Some authors (such as science fiction writers David Gerrold in Jumping off the Planet, Kim Stanley Robinson in Red Mars, and Ben Bova in Mercury) have suggested that such a failure would be catastrophic, with the thousands of kilometers of falling cable creating a swath of meteoric destruction along Earth's surface. However, in most cable designs, the upper portion of any cable that fell to Earth would burn up in the atmosphere. Additionally because proposed initial cables (the only ones likely to be broken) have very low mass (roughly 1 kg per kilometer) and are flat, the bottom portion would likely settle to Earth with less force than a sheet of paper due to air resistance on the way down.
Which is interesting. However, I agree that we'd do better to do initial tests on the Moon simply so that any accidents don't harm either actual or (in the case of Mars) potentially terraformable environments. |
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