Posted on 07/17/2015 4:43:58 AM PDT by Kaslin
If I recall, the hextube idea was Robert Forward’s work around. There was a specific braiding pattern he described where if one fiber broke, the force would be routed around the break and back to the original fiber. It certainly wouldn’t be a single strand but more of many cables made up of many strands formed into a mostly open space tube or ladder.
It was part of his work around for his fiction. In Saturn Rukh he used nanofiber tethers fired into asteroids from spaceships to make hard turns putting considerably more force on the tether than it could bear. He got around the problem with a braking system that is essentially like the drag on a fishing reel.
Forward was widely known as a science fiction writer but he was the real deal physicist with the credentials to back it up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_L._Forward
Obviously the space elevator is a different application but the force is divided between the earth anchor point and space anchor point with an adjustable weight system that moved up and down from the 26,000 mile point.
Sure that’s the way we’d go about it, but it would still take quite some time for the new plantlife to generate enough atmosphere to make it a suitable environment for Earth.
At minimum, multiple milleniums I would think.
You also have to generate a magnetic field for mars so the solar wind wouldn’t strip away the atmosphere.
current existing plantlife maybe.
you have to understand that even plants will soon be changeable at will
PRIVATE enterprise will be the heralds of the return to space exploration, and, most likely, planetary settlements/transforming.
I say this not only from a Constitutional perspective, but from a strict bottom-line view. Govt cares not one whit for cost, benefit, market forces not outcome, unlike the shareholders, owners and hobbyists currently sending anything up in/out of orbit.
Yes, the material used would have to be 100's of times stronger than our most exotically strongest materials. But we have a lot to learn and the potential is enormous.
Some say carbon nanotubes. Imagine combining this with large scale, manufactured spider silk with strands thousands of kilometers long.
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