Great episode. There's a Sci Fi Manga called "Battle Angel Alita" that discusses conflict on a post apocalyptic surface, a space elevator archopolis, space stations, compartmentalized terraformed bubble habitats on Mars, and the environments as well as specialized lifeforms for surviving those. The second major story arch focuses on the space elevator archopolis. A very interesting subject indeed.
@@lljkgktudjlrsmygilug decent. The overall sequence of events lines up. Some of the characters are changed like the lady Dr. I don't remember a street ball sequence with neighborhood kids. Overall, a great adaptation. 9 out of 10, would recommend.
@@outandabout259 There is a book with the results of a study sponsored by NASA about space elevators. You can learn the physics, equations, pros/cons and cost estimates for such a structure. If you are more sci-fi prone, read Clark's Fountains of Paradise, a very good novel
There are interesting notions in Anime or Manga who explore settings like that too. Ergo Proxy does bubbles. Gundamn 00 does Space Elevator scenes. And weirder Space scenes. BLAME! does a bunch Superstructure stuff. The world is essentially a rampant Dyson Sphere. Or the like. The same guy does Knights of Sidonia, which goes truly truly Transhuman. Emphasis on Trans. Less emphasis on human. There’s a ton of stuff out there to give an image.
The scale of a birch planet is honestly mind boggling. If you wanted, you could manufacture a space tower, lightyears tall that is capable of launching *entire planets* into orbit, and it wouldnt even be visible a quarter through the planet
@@isaacarthurSFIA I complained above that "birch planets" made no sense to me because the largest megastructures I am familiar with in fiction are Dyson's Spheres, Ring Worlds and Alderson Discs. Can you please tell me if you have another episode that explains what the hell a "birch world" is? and how the hell its so much bigger than a Dyson's Sphere or Alderson Disc and why it is not listed on Wikipedia along with the other hypothetical megastructures? Maybe do an entire show on JUST THAT? You barely mentioned it and gave no explanation that I could identify with. You cannot just SAY something is that big and expect most people to comprehend it.
@@Zurround he’s discussed the concept before, and it gets wild. Start with a shell world, layer after layer of planetary surface. Now, the innermost layer surrounds Sagittarius A* (the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy) at the distance where gravity is one G. And you have billions of levels. He wasn’t kidding about looking out on a disassembled galaxy.
@@highlorddarkstar I am sorry but I cannot comprehend this and I CAN comprehend Dyson's sphere and Alderson Disc. He seriously needs to do an entire show on JUST THAT ONE THING ITS THAT DAMNED BIG.
@@highlorddarkstar a sagA* birch world would be on the low end of size, at only 4 million solaf masses, it would be several hundred AU in diameter. A birch planet's size is capped by the fact the radius of the black hole (the event horizon) has less surface gravity the more mass it has (but more gravity in total). The cap for a 1g birch world would be a trillion solar masses, around the mass of the milky way and a lightyear wide. To put these 2 into perspective, you could build the entirety of the first birch world *inside the habitable layers of the second*
I just couldn't believe the levels of maintenance that would be required in these structures. The first thing that tripped me up was all the vacuum seals needed. Yes, they can be built, but what happens WHEN they fail. You can section off your vacuum tunnels, but what happens when the segment seals, that haven't been used in fourty years, don't close. In my job, I deal with steam, hot water, oxygen, and vacuum lines as well as elevators. There are elevators that are just abandoned because you can't get parts for them after a hundred years. All these basic engineering ideas are possible, but not always maintainable. All these active components make me think of steam power. Not many buildings use steam anymore. The technology to use it exists and is well understood. It's very old tech. Steam is really useful for a lot of things, but even though we have it, we're phasing it out. Why? Because it's corrosive and eats through steel. A good friend of mine was killed by a bursting steam line. You can't handle the lines, they're too hot. You need to staff the building round the clock in case of a boiler failure. A million little reasons pile up as the system ages and makes it very hard to keep everything working. What happens when the entity that owned the structure is no longer around? What if a sundial structure is abandoned? Building them is one thing. Maintenance for the next forty to a hundred years is a different issue.
@@bristoled93 I don't think we have a framework for that. If you figure it out it would be a valuable concept. Until then, places that are owned by everyone are maintained by nobody. It's called "the tragedy of the commons." Figure out a way, because no one else has. Otherwise it's owned by a government or corporation. Having multiple bodies in control is a recipe for disaster. Image of the international space station was a 100 mile tall tower. One body pulls out and there's talk of abandoning it. Government isn't much better, one administration would do everything right but eventually you'd get a group that thought it was a waste and intentionally neglect it.
Topic request: The end of time - what happens when a Dyson swarm is abandoned and left to its own devices. Do planets reform? Are they on any plane? Would the planet be more homogenous than typical? What other unique features would there be? Would any be detectable from a long-away observation with a telescope?
A great addition to the megastructures series! Though it pales in comparison to some of the truly huge structures you’ve presented in the past, it’s much closer to what we can realistically imagine now.
No, its total fantasy , this is a fantasy channel rapped up in the most extreme version of what`s possible possible . Like its scientifically possible for a giant alien spaceship to swallow the sun for lols type possible.
As always the sheer scale of the things you portray is made all the more awe inspiring when I consider how grounded and scientifically real they can be. Wonderful work as always.
That "birch planet" thing was too confusing for me and did NOT have enough of a description beyond how impossibly big it was. Can we please all ask him to elaborate further or maybe do an entire show on JUST THAT? I think its even more impressive than the Dyson's Sphere on the Star Trek Next Gen episode "Relics"?
I've been VERY excited about this episode! It's a subject I'm fascinated in, and there was no 100% no disappointment!! Great episode, sir!! I would love to live to see space towers being built!
No reference to the Space Elevator that gets destroyed in the Foundation? It's incredible to see it come down and I love how they had it drag across the city as it came down
Hearing him describe a glimpse of a 230th century world makes me wish he’d do an episode just imagining the world(s) people might inhabit a million or so years from now. Tbh I haven’t watched SFIA in quite a while, and if this is the norm now then I’ll probably rewatch the last 100 episodes.
Well you do need to put a mass driver up there to launch things from at high speed so the T seems completely justified. I'm imagining a series of these thing presented every way it's been presented in the show(OG TT cuz im not heathen). The times its been taken over, ruined, the future version, etc.
That's one of the things that irks me in Sci Fi settings where they have anti gravity and gravity control. That stuff is an obscene cheat code and we should have things that would make WH40k artists blush at the audacity.
i love the visual of billboards on the side of a kilometer tall structure, definitely good use of advertising budget putting a pepsi logo 5 kilometers in the air on a 10 meter billboard
You need to be able to control the weather also. An F-4 or 5 tornado will make mince meat out of a tower. Hurricane wind is slower than a tornado, however, they hang around longer.
in the 80's there was some discussion of how tall a building could be built with present technology, it boiled down to the only limitation being elevator technology, yet without that limitation... 11kilometres.
Suddenly, the idea of DM-Morpheus from Unreal does not seem that ridiculous anymore. Dude, your stuff is always so inspirational. I have a story set in 2380 so you bet I am going to keep an eye on that episode.
anything falling from a tower will be at terminal velocity in air. a cable, even a foot thick, will be below 200 mph, and really won't cause much, if any significant damage. because they are not at orbital velocity, but at ground velocity.
@@lavenderlilacproductions It doesn’t help that a vocal minority are encouraging politicians to focus on culture war issues and performative politics instead of projects like this that would actually unite us, or even other things that would practically improve our lives.
@@UpliftedCapybara Careful saying something will unite us. Remember 30 years ago people believed that easy access to information would eliminate misinformation..
I imagined how a 1950s sci-fi might envision a space tower and space train, at least up to 30 km maybe. A large hydrogen balloon tows miles of chain-spring-cable to provide a taut vertical "tower" where a track can be fitted around it and going up in a spiral. The train could run on diesel and then switch to a rocket mechanism as it nears the top.
Great content! I would just like to add that, even at the modest height of modern-day skyscrapers, wind loads are a much better deal than gravity loads... meaning that most of the steel on those structures goes towards directing horizontal forces to the terrain. Remove the weather, and then we can talk.
Beyond certain heights, these structures would have to be protected by a flotilla of buoyant windmills. These would reduce the speed of the winds 🎯 the structure. As a bonus, these could power some of the tower.
Sabotaging and watching a Space Elevator Tower collapse sounds like an Excellent thing to see in a James Bond flick.. Earth Raker. Wonder if they would also have Power Plants staggered along this 100 mile highway to the latest platform spaceport. Pumping out greenhouse gases or solar or wind powered. Would there be multiple cable highways.. with Buccees along the way?
Solar panels would be deployed in space as they are far more efficient there. Wind would be none existent the higher you got as the pressure needed to move the fans would drop off quickly. Also need too much space for wind power than the tower would provide. Fossil Fuel plants would be impractical as you would have to move the material up to them to burn. It would be much easier to have the plants on the ground, then pump the electricity and waste gas up to the top. Waste gas being used as pressurized launch system for spacecraft to "blow" them clear of the port before they ignite their own propulsion.
At 23:30, I do want to push back against one thing. I have a hard time imagining that languages could diverge in the Sun Dial, especially if it starts homogenous. Languages diverge in isolation and converge in communication. The whole existance of a tower like this is predicated on a certain amount of free travel along its height, otherwise the interconnected systems should collapse at some point, rendering it mostly uninhabitable. Additionally, such a structure requires constant power, and probably constant intercommunication, they are all on same internet, which should also slow divergence. Third, it is a manufactured thing, with maintenance requirements, and the original language will thus remain a force for all who learn the systems discouraging linguistic drift. The Tower's language may shift over time, but I would need to see a very good case that the floors could become isolated from each other enough for linguistic divergence, while still being interconnected enough to allow the tower to exist and function.
I offer the example of English. Several countries in constant contact speak this language and have for two centuries at least now. Yet there are differences in that common language in how it is spoken, word usage, and such. Even with in those countries dialects have began to sprout up.
@@davidtherwhanger6795 The difference with English is that the colonies each spent relatively long periods in relative isolation. Nowadays there is a certain degree of accent flattening, at least within the US. The Tower, even with different "countries" owning different levels, is inherently more integrated, both physically and through internet or internet style systems. Languages naturally drift, but it is that drift plus barriers that allow them to drift apart. Languages in communication with each other move towards homogenization, like with word borrowings, creoles, or the English integration we are starting to see in places like India, Philippines and similar.
@@jamesbleckley7872 And yet I still see divergence in Texas English and that of Alabama, New York, California, Arkansas, Oklahoma, etc. You also see it in Latin America where in different parts of the same country even a word could have different meanings do to slang changes. I could see this happening as different levels of the tower became dominated by different ethnic and linguistic groups even if they spoke the same language they would have different influences on that language.
@@jamesbleckley7872 just remember how many thousand years this tower has lasted, and how long an elevator ride could get. There is separation in time and space. Internet might slow it, but it might be its own language and “hallway slang” is the local language.
Yeah, its really the best to put the whole of humanity in o n e singular tower - and the rest of mother earth (flora and fauna) will live in utterly quietitude and peace . . .
after the first space towers video and the orbital ring video i was imagining a series of space towers connected to an orbital ring. i did a bit of messing around in blender to create the active support loops... i had it start out wider at the bottom and was using large islands as the size references...... i still have a graphic i made to show where the different layers of the atmosphere and ocean heights.... and it has some boxes that i think i was using for the base.... basically i was picturing building a bunch of space towers that all leaned on each other to create like a mountain that reaches up into space... that could probably house and support the entire human population including all their food productions and industrial needs.... and i was like we should build a few of these all connected to an orbital ring.... like continent class arcologies lol.
23:42 flashback to “is there a black hole with a surface gravity of 1G at its event horizon? “YES.” It would mass 1.5x10^12 solar masses and have a diameter or nearly one light year. That is the largest megastructure we could build under known physics. Ok WhYYY would you build such a thing?“ from the megaearths episode. 24:45 well whaddya know? Love your stuff Isaac. Incidentally we share the same birthday. :)
The heat dissipated by a tower that is wide would possibly impact local stratospheric conditions and create weather phenomena. I'm still worried about how vulnerable this would be to hostile action.
It would be like an inverted chimney. Or heat is transported up the tower for this very reason and only radiated away above the atmosphere. With a lot of radiators....
When I see those tall, thin buildings, all I can think of is that they would fall over easily. I'm probably wrong but that's what my brain can't get past.
Why not build in a double helix? Major elevator in the center, surrounded by structural helix, and 5-20 floor elevators can fit in-between the helix reinforcement.
There is a very peculiar balance for a structure tethered to Earth to have to stay at a specific strength when flying around the planet tethered... adding mass to the end of that structure will multiply the stress along the tether, compounding it for every pound added. You might find the ability to send things up there will be vastly limited, therefore rocket launching payloads still economical compared to that of the space tower- but it will still have used for ferrying astronauts to space, and smaller satellite like payloads. Larger things such as that of things like Hubble sized or JWST, would not be possible, you would need to build it up upon the platform... and manage that mass accordingly.
Even for people who are NOT considered acrophobic and are ok with being in a tall real life building these buildings might be too scary for them. I get nervous thinking about it.
Heh... the sweet memory that silly tall tower gives me. We built an actual tower - a massive one - as tall as you could ever make - on a virtual world. Well I helped, my husband, then BF, made it over ONE NIGHT - cause our old place on old sim was lost due the virtual bit of land being sold by the land lord - all of which had made me kinda sad. Damned sweet of him. But that thing became a huge land mark on the new sim. Had special rights for it, cause you could see it never mind where you were on that bit of virtual land or up in the air... all the way to how high the sky reached. It had all sorts of parts - seemingly floating and so forth - and every more solid like part had strange chamber or environment hidden within. Those we did make later, after the main structure was done. Obviously we had our own 'bed chamber' at the top, you know a private space. And with that a tiny roof top garden with two cherry trees twisted around each other at the very top, and bellow that chamber a building plate, you know a location to make more stuff at. Anyhow aside to also having a guest room - there were a lot more, much stranger chambers in that tower. It's boring to try and build with other clickable parts of environment around you so having access to open sky back ground is kinda must for appropriate building place. But on those chambers, the secret bits of a strange universe within all of them. A kind of grinder to get rid of 'dead old avatars' - yea that was like one of those skeleton crypts with mechanical parts to it and a puzzle to figure out how to get away from there. Oh, and a inside garden. Cyber prison. A kind of snow white AI chamber, with bit of odd liquid about and a strange book. Every part like the crypt-grinder thing - a puzzle to move up. And eventually even a chamber with teleport portals that would randomly more or less send you up or down to some other chamber - sometimes to other parts of the virtual world entirely. Stupid thing was that people aren't curious enough or patient enough to try to solve in-game games like that. So they just try to fly lazy to look around it - obviously we forbid that but such settings are almost like made to be circumvented. Regardless we had quite a bit of folk just look at it. I did make video of the place when we moved to next sim. This time voluntarily, mostly due different land rules, better price from same owner who is damned cool and reliable. That 'land' we still got - all thought this one we have rebuilt at least 3 times since due game related changes that made something not work right - lol. Idk why they got to tweak their damned script language so much. No, it's not a tower anymore - you got to change things around you know. Oh, almost forgot - while my husband build I make textures - so the on ground portion of the tower had a tiny texture store. I don't really sell that stuff anymore apart from random samples on the game market - but the point is that sometimes you don't want to share too much in the end. More fun to see them used on our own things, lol. But it was from that ground area that had two ways to end up 'transported' into the upper parts of the tower. No you can't think the spaces were really large and complicated. We did a lot with those textures alone, cause there is limits to how many building parts you can use on such virtual lands and it's sincerely too expensive to own the entire sim - lol. But seeing a tower that just reaches up and up like without an end sends me right back to the beginning of our relationship, our online dates - cause I lived in a different country, so at the time we could not really have usual dates that often. Anyhow some tower can be the sweetest gestures one remembers.
Well if you can build a tower that reach to space, you can put in the top of it a pendulum like device that can generate horizontal velocity for a payload sended from the ground, would be like a rotating skyhook attached to the top of a space tower, and every times when complete a rotation can deliver a payload to a stable orbit. Actually probably you don't need the tower to be so much taller, you only need to get out of the thicker part of atmosphere,tall enough to allow the rotating arms to work without air drag.
When a rope falls, it seems to form a V with the apex falling faster, forming a loose knot, and the two ends trailing along. Thus, the mass would be concentrated.
Then can there be a post apocalyptic story of stone age people growing up in labyrinths thinking that's all there is to their world. Then the protagonist finds out they are all in the middle of a space tower?
I'm just having a moment of incredulity at the pressure in water and sewerage piping in a 100 mile tower. Personal imagination failure does not make anything impossible, of course, but...wow. Somehow, that's even harder to wrap my head around than the scale of the Horsehead. I mean, it's less than the depth of the Marianas Trench, but even so those are going to be some /immense/ pipes.
Isaac - at 3:26 I wish you had said ". . . so we envision a vast tether with its center of gravity well beyond geostationary orbit so we can have a zero g space station on it at geostationary altitude and one a g space station out at the counterweight where we can "drop" (actually, fling) spacecraft to the Moon. . Then we can have elevator cars running back and forth to space." OK, I have to do the numbers for how far out the counterweight will have to be to feel one g outward and whether or not a spacecraft could actually be flung to the Moon from there or even into solar orbit.
2 words: Buckling and wind. The engineering challenges of building a tall, thin building, without some form of active support, are nigh insurmountable. Plus, why would you try this when orbital rings make so much more sense?
If the radiation fins were vertical the heating air around them would move up and push the fins with drag, wouldn't it? Could that do some active suport?
Can't help but wonder what cyclical tidal forces from the moon would do to either the tower (significant mass) or the tether (slightly closer lunar proximity {22k miles isn't nothing} + mass). Likely some significant issues.
Ah yes, DM-Morpheus, great map. Always looked on these projects as a logistical nightmare wrought in... whatever tensile super materials are in the news this decade.
I once did a little calculation. viennas most populated district is brigittenau with something around 26000 citizen per km², and hydroponics allow feeding up to 50.000 people per square kilometer. I'm not sure what calculation I exactly did, but austria could host over 2 billion people alone and supply them with food. but good luck with a diet that is comprised of sweet potatoe. there are bigger countries out there. the main concern at having such dense populations is: supplying them with energy means, that there needs to be a well engineered cooling system, or otherwise this will just heat up to levels that do not allow people to survive.
So, just spitballing here, but what about using a combination of compressive and tensile strength, where the bottom is supported by compressive strength and the top by tensile?
Toilets! How thick a sewer pipe do you need per person? At 40 flats per floor and 12 cm squared for a very minimal toilet connection, that is about 500 square centimeters per floor. Multiply that by 50,000 floors and you have a requirement for a sewer pipe 2,500 square meters or a square 50 by 50 meters; That is about that 200 foot by 200 foot size specified for the Houston tower. How much square area for all the electrical lines, water for the kitchen, drains to get the bath water returned, air supply and internet connections? Probably far more as you have to get the atmosphere up to the 50,000th floor and then move the stale air out. You have a near vacuum at perhaps 20 km on up, but it is the same human 15 psi all the way up. That's a HUGE amount of air to move. You have a lot of heat to dissipate in a vacuum. When the tower is sunlit, how hot will the top stories be? What about radiation? Effectively, you are in outer space.
At first I thought these would be thin towers with maybe a few 100 sqm per floor but when you described it to be 10 sqkm per floor, my mind was blown to bits. I was lost in thoughts since it's magnitude its beyond imaginations. Tho it sounds crazy you made it sounds plausible in just 300 years. Maybe not 300 but 1000s but if humanity survive that long without destroying ourselves then I'm sure it will be done.
Awesome episode! I love your show. I watch it twice every week. Once when I'm going to bed, (you have a very soothing voice) and then again the next day to get the full jist of it. If I could meet any celebrity it would be you. Do you ever get to Chicago? I drive Uber and I would love to be your driver. Hope you are recovering well from the surgery.
I loved the book Horizons Unlimited back when I was in civil air patrol back when I was a kid airforce auxiliary 46046 squad lol back in the 90s,,,good times 😊❤stay safe out there Aloha's
These will all be possible to build when we switch to a continually appreciating currency (ie. When we build our villages, and these structures with a continually appreciating currency).
I love that there are several mitigating factors and detailed considerations for some of the natural questions that I asked when hearing the concept. Some of it I've pondered for a long time, others I had never considered. It's a great resource for someone thinking about sci-fi backstory to some type of narrative story. But I'm also haunted by the ever-present sense of being a realist (or pessimist, depending on how you see it.) I think there is a near zero chance that anything like an inhabited space elevator will ever come to fruition. I can potentially see something like that being made specifically for satellites or to make certain assemblies in extremely limited capacity sometime in the relatively distant future (centuries.) There are a few very specific reasons for this, which are likely my own bias from my worldview. Primarily, I think all of this is far too wishful to ever be a viable option. It's going to require an extraordinary amount of time, money, people, resources, international cooperation, and economic/social concessions (where substantial and instrumental resources are diverted away from all across many different portions of global populations to complete/maintain a project of this magnitude.) Using resources in that way will inevitably negatively impact large amounts of people who are essentially forced into the structure, foregoing their freedoms and entitlements for "the greater good." This is a dangerous road to travel as has been seen in every single other example of socialist/communist/Marxist program ever instituted in history. And then we get to, by far, the single largest problem with this idea beyond finances/logistics- security. Everyone knows that the bigger something is (in terms of investment, size, vulnerability, economic importance, international cooperation, population density, etc), the bigger a target it becomes. Obviously it would take massive investment in money, personnel, corporate influence, international/foreign policy, physical resources, and so forth to make this a reality. But even if you _COULD_ get basically everyone on Earth to cooperate in this endeavor, there will always be people out there who want to either destroy it or threaten to destroy it for the purposes of extortion. It would be absolutely impossible to protect against any type of intentional attack on a structure of this magnitude. Even today we have people willing to strap dozens of pounds of high explosives to their body to destroy a mud hut or potentially scare ideological adversaries. Nearly every single skyscraper on Earth has been damaged, attacked, or targeted by someone for their own justifications. And with a structure like this, there are obviously serious vulnerabilities in every single system needed for it to function. If you wanted to harm a town, it would be extremely easy to strap a weapon to a ground-based drone and destroy an electrical substation. Hell, blowing up just 9 key transformer stations (none of which are guarded or protected from any type of attack at any degree) across the United States would destroy the electrical grid and send the entire country back to the pre-19th century for anywhere from 1.5-10 years. That could happen at any moment. Plus you still have to worry about random acts of nature like meteorites, solar flares, GRBs and everything else that we only ATTEMPT to mitigate. And if we pour a substantial amount of our resources into such a massive, monumental task as this, ANY failure of it sets the whole of humanity back. Even if it's simply a freak occurrence beyond our control (like a 1mm meteorite striking a critical system controller or causes a cascade of unavoidable failures), you're looking at large fractions of the global GDP just completely lost, resources gone forever, lives lost, and untold damage to infrastructure built around the logistical needs of it all. That makes the whole thing unstable which can then lead to mass conflict and even interstitial proxy wars fought amongst the survivors. Basically, I don't think that there would really ever be a point in human history where the cost-benefit analysis of such a structure would enter into "the black." It's putting far too many eggs into one basket and would become a tremendous vulnerability/liability. If we even survive (as a society) long enough to believe that population density across the entire planet would necessitate a massive space elevator inhabited by millions of people, we would certainly be well beyond the planet's carrying capacity anyway. Since everything is so well connected virtually via the internet, it is much more likely that humanity will be able to simply spread across the land in greater ways and begin expansion by digging downward. Subterranean civilizations are a far more feasible solution to this kind of problem. If we still need to consider some type of space elevator, then it will almost exclusively be used for commercial purposes rather than personal dwellings. Most of the greatest vulnerabilities to upward-built structures are entirely eliminated with sub-surface civilization centers. It's possible that we will begin building most residential and everyday commercial centers underground while utilizing vertical structures above ground for agriculture and livestock. We have a nearly endless supply of rock and an extremely stable parameter set underneath the currently inhabited lands on this planet. "Upward" should be a last resort as it always brings the greatest risk and difficulty over the long term.
Security is all relative. Every day we live with the threat of car accidents, pandemics, severe weather, crime, floods, earthquakes, volcanoes, etc. If the threat of death-by-terrorist-attack (on the particular megastructure that you're trying to lease out floorspace in) is offset by a substantially reduced risk of dying from other causes (say crime, pandemic, and floods) then the security problem is effectively solved.
Just an idea but for the elevator conundrum couldn’t you build something like a straight up and down ski lift with multiple elevators on the same cable, with some entrances going up and other entrances catching the elevator on the way back down?
Some interesting visions, but more suited to a dystopian sci-fi story (of which there are too many already) rather than a likely reality. Realistically, a basic launch loop and rotating orbital habitats would be far more practical, with no unobtainium required. Modular networks beat heirarchical structures every time.
There would definitely be advantages to building a building that's 160+ kilometers tall. One of them is provided you had vertical farms inside the building, an asteroid impact or volcanism severe enough to block out the sun and cause a volcanic winter, like the one that happened in the 540's CE, it wouldn't send humanity back to the dark ages.
A lot of large scale projects seem to work best when they have a repeatability that allows replication of something like a tower many times. To make this many pressurized towers would require such enormous quantity of material that it would not be possible without first mining asteroids or the Kuiper belt like the previous video. I think constructing a large tower on Earth or a planet of a similar magnitude will not be possible until we find a large enough source of energy required to transmit energy across the solar system. Maybe we will see something like this tower on the moon before the Earth. Cool video
24:59, could you please explain what the hell a "birch planet" is? Was it covered in a different video at some point? I am having trouble comprehending a structure a light WEEK wide and a billion billion worlds big. That is much bigger than a DYSON'S SPHERE in fiction or Ring World. I think its even bigger than an Alderson disc? Could you maybe do an entire episode ON JUST THAT or at least give us a link that goes into more detail? When I googoled megastructures I found Dyson's Sphere, Ring World, and Alderson Disc and then some things smaller than those but what you described makes no sense to me. No physical structure could be THAT BIG. Are you just making it up as you go along or is there a precedent for it??
@@UpliftedCapybara I just saw the description but its going over my head. It makes the Dyson's Sphere from the RELICS 2 part episode of Star Trek Next Gen seem insignificant by comparison. I cannot comprehend a physical construct being THAT BIG. Even the society that built the Dyson's Sphere (I think the novel called them the Iconians) would not be able to fully comprehend it. I think its BILLIONS of times bigger than the Dyson's sphere? I want him to do an entire episode on JUST THAT ONE ITEM.
9:13 wait, who says we must fill the space of the buildings with the maximum number of people possible?, a tiny fraction of those millians of people would be more than enough to maintain the towers and that way you dont have regular problams with blocked pasages up or down the tower which would defeat hte point of them in the first place.
I wonder, if the foundation for such gigaton structures with such small footprints would have to be pontons swimming in earths mantle or would have to be grounded on earths core itself. I imagine the isostatic displacement would turn the surrounding area into some bowl the tower might never outgrow, if it was founded on the crust.
Excellent episode! Ive been wondering about developments in material sciences, and if ee have the technology to build pyramids reaching above the atmosphere.
Could these towers be constructed and supported by different balloons inside and surrounding like vertically positioned airships or would they become to susceptable to wind and risk of collapsing ?
That can be done, and the wind problem could be solved by essentially tying the balloons to the tower, but you wouldn’t want to have that as your only source of levitation.
Instead of building up from the ground... why not build down from geostationary orbit from space down to a few meters above the ground where it is stationed? Doesn't have to touch... it just have to be close. Jump up a few meters... and the rest is an elevator ride up. Can use sensors on the part next to earth to help detect corrections to orbit that need to be made to stay over a particular spot. It is just a satellite with a skinny bit really close to the ground. Still need super materials to make it like carbon nanotubes and carbon fiber and what not, but you don't have to worry about being connected per se.
I wonder if we think of a space tower as two structures. One that is supported from the ground up that meets a tower like a space elevator supported from space down. That would cut down on the material strength needed for each to reach space. Or why not make a space tower supported from space say down to 200K feet ish from the ground. We then take a aircraft or rocket from the ground to meet that space tower on a platform. to make the rest of the trip.
Every study I've seen of space elevators aka beanstalks has them get wider, not narrower, as they rise, with the widest part at orbital height, where the tension is the greatest. Why does the Sundial taper as it rises?
Given the idea that building sky scrapers only makes sense when the land you build on is too expensive to expand horizontally ... it makes me think space habitats would only make sense when natural land prices on Earth (or elsewhere?) is so expensive you have to build your own land to build those buildings on. If covering the Earth with sky scrapers could support on the order of 100 trillion people by the calculations in this video, I wonder I wounder what the human population would have to be in order for the creation of a space habitat would be cheaper than building more or taller sky scrapers.
Space infrastructure for energy, manufacturing, and mining has several advantages, so I wouldn't be surprised if space habitats become cost effective before heat dissipation becomes a limiting factor for earths population. Especially since it has mobility advantages and allows egocentric individuals to build their own personal worlds both of which can justify significantly higher costs than buying land on earth.
I'd love to see the engineering calculations for the foundations on a building like this. I'm just not sure how you would go about doing this, I mean a structure with the weight of a billion trillion tons seems to be beyond our current abilities.
I watched Ad Astra that's a scene early on with the space tower... I'd this idea that instead of wirelessly beaming photovoltaic electricity we'd have towers dotted across the landscape or seascape instead and what would happen is the tower spews out some gas conducive to complete a circuit while the other half of the circuit is a space tether at vleo - capacitor banks up high and down low with the arrangement providing pulsed power as tethers pass towers at eight kms-1. I'm guessing sixty kilometres for tether and tower and the same lightning gap to give one eighty kilometres total but the gap might be less since it will all depend on atmosphere breathing electric propulsion too to stabilise or maintain tether attitude and position etc..
Today we built up into the heavens, but what about digging down into hell? How deep can we tunnel? Heat is an obvious bottlekneck, and the immense pressures of even just a few dozen meters of dirt and rock can't be overstated. Yet mining operations and even some caves can be found multiple kilometers underground.
Consider a network of balloons tethered to each other; and an active system to control the buoyancy to each element such that the individual forces between nodes on that tether never exceeds engineering constraints; combine this with orbital rings.
Great episode. There's a Sci Fi Manga called "Battle Angel Alita" that discusses conflict on a post apocalyptic surface, a space elevator archopolis, space stations, compartmentalized terraformed bubble habitats on Mars, and the environments as well as specialized lifeforms for surviving those. The second major story arch focuses on the space elevator archopolis. A very interesting subject indeed.
interesting, gotta read that!
How faithful is the live action film in your opinion?
@@lljkgktudjlrsmygilug decent. The overall sequence of events lines up. Some of the characters are changed like the lady Dr. I don't remember a street ball sequence with neighborhood kids. Overall, a great adaptation. 9 out of 10, would recommend.
@@outandabout259 There is a book with the results of a study sponsored by NASA about space elevators. You can learn the physics, equations, pros/cons and cost estimates for such a structure. If you are more sci-fi prone, read Clark's Fountains of Paradise, a very good novel
There are interesting notions in Anime or Manga who explore settings like that too.
Ergo Proxy does bubbles.
Gundamn 00 does Space Elevator scenes. And weirder Space scenes.
BLAME! does a bunch Superstructure stuff. The world is essentially a rampant Dyson Sphere. Or the like.
The same guy does Knights of Sidonia, which goes truly truly Transhuman. Emphasis on Trans. Less emphasis on human.
There’s a ton of stuff out there to give an image.
The scale of a birch planet is honestly mind boggling.
If you wanted, you could manufacture a space tower, lightyears tall that is capable of launching *entire planets* into orbit, and it wouldnt even be visible a quarter through the planet
The scale of a normal planet is mind boggling, a Birch Planet is simply mind-shattering :)
@@isaacarthurSFIA I complained above that "birch planets" made no sense to me because the largest megastructures I am familiar with in fiction are Dyson's Spheres, Ring Worlds and Alderson Discs. Can you please tell me if you have another episode that explains what the hell a "birch world" is? and how the hell its so much bigger than a Dyson's Sphere or Alderson Disc and why it is not listed on Wikipedia along with the other hypothetical megastructures? Maybe do an entire show on JUST THAT? You barely mentioned it and gave no explanation that I could identify with. You cannot just SAY something is that big and expect most people to comprehend it.
@@Zurround he’s discussed the concept before, and it gets wild. Start with a shell world, layer after layer of planetary surface. Now, the innermost layer surrounds Sagittarius A* (the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy) at the distance where gravity is one G. And you have billions of levels. He wasn’t kidding about looking out on a disassembled galaxy.
@@highlorddarkstar I am sorry but I cannot comprehend this and I CAN comprehend Dyson's sphere and Alderson Disc. He seriously needs to do an entire show on JUST THAT ONE THING ITS THAT DAMNED BIG.
@@highlorddarkstar a sagA* birch world would be on the low end of size, at only 4 million solaf masses, it would be several hundred AU in diameter.
A birch planet's size is capped by the fact the radius of the black hole (the event horizon) has less surface gravity the more mass it has (but more gravity in total). The cap for a 1g birch world would be a trillion solar masses, around the mass of the milky way and a lightyear wide.
To put these 2 into perspective, you could build the entirety of the first birch world *inside the habitable layers of the second*
I just couldn't believe the levels of maintenance that would be required in these structures. The first thing that tripped me up was all the vacuum seals needed. Yes, they can be built, but what happens WHEN they fail. You can section off your vacuum tunnels, but what happens when the segment seals, that haven't been used in fourty years, don't close.
In my job, I deal with steam, hot water, oxygen, and vacuum lines as well as elevators.
There are elevators that are just abandoned because you can't get parts for them after a hundred years.
All these basic engineering ideas are possible, but not always maintainable. All these active components make me think of steam power.
Not many buildings use steam anymore. The technology to use it exists and is well understood. It's very old tech. Steam is really useful for a lot of things, but even though we have it, we're phasing it out. Why? Because it's corrosive and eats through steel. A good friend of mine was killed by a bursting steam line. You can't handle the lines, they're too hot. You need to staff the building round the clock in case of a boiler failure. A million little reasons pile up as the system ages and makes it very hard to keep everything working.
What happens when the entity that owned the structure is no longer around? What if a sundial structure is abandoned?
Building them is one thing. Maintenance for the next forty to a hundred years is a different issue.
Why can't humanity as a whole own it.
@@bristoled93 I don't think we have a framework for that. If you figure it out it would be a valuable concept. Until then, places that are owned by everyone are maintained by nobody. It's called "the tragedy of the commons." Figure out a way, because no one else has.
Otherwise it's owned by a government or corporation. Having multiple bodies in control is a recipe for disaster. Image of the international space station was a 100 mile tall tower. One body pulls out and there's talk of abandoning it.
Government isn't much better, one administration would do everything right but eventually you'd get a group that thought it was a waste and intentionally neglect it.
Topic request: The end of time - what happens when a Dyson swarm is abandoned and left to its own devices. Do planets reform? Are they on any plane? Would the planet be more homogenous than typical? What other unique features would there be? Would any be detectable from a long-away observation with a telescope?
A great addition to the megastructures series! Though it pales in comparison to some of the truly huge structures you’ve presented in the past, it’s much closer to what we can realistically imagine now.
No, its total fantasy , this is a fantasy channel rapped up in the most extreme version of what`s possible possible . Like its scientifically possible for a giant alien spaceship to swallow the sun for lols type possible.
@@Dan-dy8zp Yes , not total fantasy , that's all i was saying . But one shouldn't mix the two without explicitly saying so and where.
As always the sheer scale of the things you portray is made all the more awe inspiring when I consider how grounded and scientifically real they can be.
Wonderful work as always.
That "birch planet" thing was too confusing for me and did NOT have enough of a description beyond how impossibly big it was. Can we please all ask him to elaborate further or maybe do an entire show on JUST THAT? I think its even more impressive than the Dyson's Sphere on the Star Trek Next Gen episode "Relics"?
@@Zurround He has covered Birch Planets in his Megastructures Compendium episode. You can find it timestamped in the description.
I've been VERY excited about this episode! It's a subject I'm fascinated in, and there was no 100% no disappointment!! Great episode, sir!! I would love to live to see space towers being built!
No reference to the Space Elevator that gets destroyed in the Foundation? It's incredible to see it come down and I love how they had it drag across the city as it came down
Hearing him describe a glimpse of a 230th century world makes me wish he’d do an episode just imagining the world(s) people might inhabit a million or so years from now. Tbh I haven’t watched SFIA in quite a while, and if this is the norm now then I’ll probably rewatch the last 100 episodes.
"With many different languages." Nice Babel reference!
🙌 👏 🙏 🤝 👍 you BET ! This is exactly what´s been my first thought too. We are in perfect END Times -> "pride comes before the fall". . . .
A Titan tower that's not a T shape? Rediculous 😂
Well you do need to put a mass driver up there to launch things from at high speed so the T seems completely justified.
I'm imagining a series of these thing presented every way it's been presented in the show(OG TT cuz im not heathen). The times its been taken over, ruined, the future version, etc.
Love your work Isaac top notch as always
That's one of the things that irks me in Sci Fi settings where they have anti gravity and gravity control.
That stuff is an obscene cheat code and we should have things that would make WH40k artists blush at the audacity.
i love the visual of billboards on the side of a kilometer tall structure, definitely good use of advertising budget putting a pepsi logo 5 kilometers in the air on a 10 meter billboard
Hi it was me who made those visuals for this video - yeah I was laughing too when i made them; like who can even see them?? haha
@@ydvisual5530 thanks for contributing to the video, I love the visuals isaac runs in the background :)
You need to be able to control the weather also. An F-4 or 5 tornado will make mince meat out of a tower. Hurricane wind is slower than a tornado, however, they hang around longer.
🙌 👏 🙏 🤝 👍 great thoughts . . . .
Did see on video on what will happen if a Tornado hit a skyscraper have not watched it yet
lol...climate and space weather are so important to this heavy industrial space elevator, too heavy and weak to meets uncertainty.
Excellent video Isaac and team! Beautiful artwork and sound. Can't wait to see the future episodes around Digital Afterlives and Lunar Mining.
in the 80's there was some discussion of how tall a building could be built with present technology, it boiled down to the only limitation being elevator technology, yet without that limitation... 11kilometres.
Suddenly, the idea of DM-Morpheus from Unreal does not seem that ridiculous anymore.
Dude, your stuff is always so inspirational. I have a story set in 2380 so you bet I am going to keep an eye on that episode.
Just what I was thinking, I always thought they were absurd, but not, that map seems ahead of it's time.
anything falling from a tower will be at terminal velocity in air. a cable, even a foot thick, will be below 200 mph, and really won't cause much, if any significant damage. because they are not at orbital velocity, but at ground velocity.
Some objects have an extremely high terminal velocity (tungsten rods for example)
better still use flat ribbons instead of round cable for lower terminal velocity
Watching stuff like this just makes me wonder why we aren’t working on projects like this now. It feels like it should be a priority.
The Powers That Be decided to focus on Chicken Nuggets, genitalia and Cardi B instead.
@@lavenderlilacproductions or power & money. Niccolo Machiavelli is right yet again, 500 years later
@@lavenderlilacproductions I hate every bit of the truth of this comment
@@lavenderlilacproductions It doesn’t help that a vocal minority are encouraging politicians to focus on culture war issues and performative politics instead of projects like this that would actually unite us, or even other things that would practically improve our lives.
@@UpliftedCapybara Careful saying something will unite us. Remember 30 years ago people believed that easy access to information would eliminate misinformation..
I imagined how a 1950s sci-fi might envision a space tower and space train, at least up to 30 km maybe. A large hydrogen balloon tows miles of chain-spring-cable to provide a taut vertical "tower" where a track can be fitted around it and going up in a spiral. The train could run on diesel and then switch to a rocket mechanism as it nears the top.
Space towers could be one of the many incredible technological and architectural breakthroughs ever.
Or as a tool for a powerful nation to spread its influence, especially if it's space based solar power.
Great content! I would just like to add that, even at the modest height of modern-day skyscrapers, wind loads are a much better deal than gravity loads... meaning that most of the steel on those structures goes towards directing horizontal forces to the terrain. Remove the weather, and then we can talk.
Beyond certain heights, these structures would have to be protected by a flotilla of buoyant windmills. These would reduce the speed of the winds 🎯 the structure. As a bonus, these could power some of the tower.
I’m dreaming big, and I wish I could experience the ideas you convey with such talent!
Sabotaging and watching a Space Elevator Tower collapse sounds like an Excellent thing to see in a James Bond flick.. Earth Raker. Wonder if they would also have Power Plants staggered along this 100 mile highway to the latest platform spaceport. Pumping out greenhouse gases or solar or wind powered. Would there be multiple cable highways.. with Buccees along the way?
Solar panels would be deployed in space as they are far more efficient there. Wind would be none existent the higher you got as the pressure needed to move the fans would drop off quickly. Also need too much space for wind power than the tower would provide. Fossil Fuel plants would be impractical as you would have to move the material up to them to burn. It would be much easier to have the plants on the ground, then pump the electricity and waste gas up to the top. Waste gas being used as pressurized launch system for spacecraft to "blow" them clear of the port before they ignite their own propulsion.
At 23:30, I do want to push back against one thing. I have a hard time imagining that languages could diverge in the Sun Dial, especially if it starts homogenous. Languages diverge in isolation and converge in communication. The whole existance of a tower like this is predicated on a certain amount of free travel along its height, otherwise the interconnected systems should collapse at some point, rendering it mostly uninhabitable. Additionally, such a structure requires constant power, and probably constant intercommunication, they are all on same internet, which should also slow divergence. Third, it is a manufactured thing, with maintenance requirements, and the original language will thus remain a force for all who learn the systems discouraging linguistic drift. The Tower's language may shift over time, but I would need to see a very good case that the floors could become isolated from each other enough for linguistic divergence, while still being interconnected enough to allow the tower to exist and function.
I offer the example of English. Several countries in constant contact speak this language and have for two centuries at least now. Yet there are differences in that common language in how it is spoken, word usage, and such. Even with in those countries dialects have began to sprout up.
@@davidtherwhanger6795 The difference with English is that the colonies each spent relatively long periods in relative isolation. Nowadays there is a certain degree of accent flattening, at least within the US. The Tower, even with different "countries" owning different levels, is inherently more integrated, both physically and through internet or internet style systems. Languages naturally drift, but it is that drift plus barriers that allow them to drift apart. Languages in communication with each other move towards homogenization, like with word borrowings, creoles, or the English integration we are starting to see in places like India, Philippines and similar.
@@jamesbleckley7872 And yet I still see divergence in Texas English and that of Alabama, New York, California, Arkansas, Oklahoma, etc. You also see it in Latin America where in different parts of the same country even a word could have different meanings do to slang changes.
I could see this happening as different levels of the tower became dominated by different ethnic and linguistic groups even if they spoke the same language they would have different influences on that language.
It seems hard to know. Let's see what Isaac et al have planned for the 2323 episode
@@jamesbleckley7872 just remember how many thousand years this tower has lasted, and how long an elevator ride could get. There is separation in time and space. Internet might slow it, but it might be its own language and “hallway slang” is the local language.
Yeah, its really the best to put the whole of humanity in o n e singular tower - and the rest of mother earth (flora and fauna) will live in utterly quietitude and peace . . .
Hey Isaac! Love this one only because it scares the life out of me. Greetings from MCMurdo station. 😁👍
You should be safe from falling at least!
Avoid reading any Lovecraft till you get home. 😅😅
@@garyjenkins7249 Nope not reading any of that! Been dark for 2 months now 🤣 lol
Is it nice this time of year?
Balmy temps, almost up to 0 Fahrenheit, ice as far as the eye can see?
after the first space towers video and the orbital ring video i was imagining a series of space towers connected to an orbital ring. i did a bit of messing around in blender to create the active support loops... i had it start out wider at the bottom and was using large islands as the size references...... i still have a graphic i made to show where the different layers of the atmosphere and ocean heights.... and it has some boxes that i think i was using for the base....
basically i was picturing building a bunch of space towers that all leaned on each other to create like a mountain that reaches up into space... that could probably house and support the entire human population including all their food productions and industrial needs.... and i was like we should build a few of these all connected to an orbital ring.... like continent class arcologies lol.
You may be interested to check out Gundam 00, it features exactly such a setup
Been watching Isaac since the beginning and he's still just as good if not better
23:42 flashback to “is there a black hole with a surface gravity of 1G at its event horizon? “YES.” It would mass 1.5x10^12 solar masses and have a diameter or nearly one light year. That is the largest megastructure we could build under known physics. Ok WhYYY would you build such a thing?“ from the megaearths episode.
24:45 well whaddya know?
Love your stuff Isaac. Incidentally we share the same birthday. :)
The heat dissipated by a tower that is wide would possibly impact local stratospheric conditions and create weather phenomena. I'm still worried about how vulnerable this would be to hostile action.
It would be like an inverted chimney. Or heat is transported up the tower for this very reason and only radiated away above the atmosphere. With a lot of radiators....
Thinking about a place so impossibly big and so impossibly full of people and history, it is both awing and scary.
When I see those tall, thin buildings, all I can think of is that they would fall over easily. I'm probably wrong but that's what my brain can't get past.
I say Isaac Arthur's tag line should be "Can we build bigger? YES!"
"If brute force isn't working your not using enough of it"
They could do a shirt of Arthur once said:
They should build a huge magnetic railgun system up the side of a mountain that is capable of shooting ships and payloads into space.
Why not build in a double helix? Major elevator in the center, surrounded by structural helix, and 5-20 floor elevators can fit in-between the helix reinforcement.
That would be a neat design
There is a very peculiar balance for a structure tethered to Earth to have to stay at a specific strength when flying around the planet tethered... adding mass to the end of that structure will multiply the stress along the tether, compounding it for every pound added. You might find the ability to send things up there will be vastly limited, therefore rocket launching payloads still economical compared to that of the space tower- but it will still have used for ferrying astronauts to space, and smaller satellite like payloads. Larger things such as that of things like Hubble sized or JWST, would not be possible, you would need to build it up upon the platform... and manage that mass accordingly.
Even for people who are NOT considered acrophobic and are ok with being in a tall real life building these buildings might be too scary for them. I get nervous thinking about it.
The view would be AMAZING!
Old pilot here, I love to go high.
Happy Arthursday 🎉🎉🎉 Early gang for the win
Did you mean feliz jueves
Less goo! Arthursday
Happy Arthursday
@@madcircle7311 15:12
@@madcircle7311 15:43
Imagine the moment you suddenly become weightless in the elevator and realize you are now in space!
At 100 miles high u wouls still experience 99.99% gravity so no
Heh... the sweet memory that silly tall tower gives me. We built an actual tower - a massive one - as tall as you could ever make - on a virtual world. Well I helped, my husband, then BF, made it over ONE NIGHT - cause our old place on old sim was lost due the virtual bit of land being sold by the land lord - all of which had made me kinda sad. Damned sweet of him. But that thing became a huge land mark on the new sim. Had special rights for it, cause you could see it never mind where you were on that bit of virtual land or up in the air... all the way to how high the sky reached.
It had all sorts of parts - seemingly floating and so forth - and every more solid like part had strange chamber or environment hidden within. Those we did make later, after the main structure was done. Obviously we had our own 'bed chamber' at the top, you know a private space. And with that a tiny roof top garden with two cherry trees twisted around each other at the very top, and bellow that chamber a building plate, you know a location to make more stuff at. Anyhow aside to also having a guest room - there were a lot more, much stranger chambers in that tower. It's boring to try and build with other clickable parts of environment around you so having access to open sky back ground is kinda must for appropriate building place. But on those chambers, the secret bits of a strange universe within all of them. A kind of grinder to get rid of 'dead old avatars' - yea that was like one of those skeleton crypts with mechanical parts to it and a puzzle to figure out how to get away from there. Oh, and a inside garden. Cyber prison. A kind of snow white AI chamber, with bit of odd liquid about and a strange book. Every part like the crypt-grinder thing - a puzzle to move up. And eventually even a chamber with teleport portals that would randomly more or less send you up or down to some other chamber - sometimes to other parts of the virtual world entirely. Stupid thing was that people aren't curious enough or patient enough to try to solve in-game games like that. So they just try to fly lazy to look around it - obviously we forbid that but such settings are almost like made to be circumvented. Regardless we had quite a bit of folk just look at it.
I did make video of the place when we moved to next sim. This time voluntarily, mostly due different land rules, better price from same owner who is damned cool and reliable. That 'land' we still got - all thought this one we have rebuilt at least 3 times since due game related changes that made something not work right - lol. Idk why they got to tweak their damned script language so much. No, it's not a tower anymore - you got to change things around you know. Oh, almost forgot - while my husband build I make textures - so the on ground portion of the tower had a tiny texture store. I don't really sell that stuff anymore apart from random samples on the game market - but the point is that sometimes you don't want to share too much in the end. More fun to see them used on our own things, lol. But it was from that ground area that had two ways to end up 'transported' into the upper parts of the tower. No you can't think the spaces were really large and complicated. We did a lot with those textures alone, cause there is limits to how many building parts you can use on such virtual lands and it's sincerely too expensive to own the entire sim - lol. But seeing a tower that just reaches up and up like without an end sends me right back to the beginning of our relationship, our online dates - cause I lived in a different country, so at the time we could not really have usual dates that often. Anyhow some tower can be the sweetest gestures one remembers.
I like the version of Orbital Towers in the book:
3001, The Final Odyssey
Arthur C Clarke.
And refer to when something goes awry with such a tower in the Mars Trilogy (Red, Green and Blue) by Kim Stanley Robinson.
Well if you can build a tower that reach to space, you can put in the top of it a pendulum like device that can generate horizontal velocity for a payload sended from the ground, would be like a rotating skyhook attached to the top of a space tower, and every times when complete a rotation can deliver a payload to a stable orbit. Actually probably you don't need the tower to be so much taller, you only need to get out of the thicker part of atmosphere,tall enough to allow the rotating arms to work without air drag.
When a rope falls, it seems to form a V with the apex falling faster, forming a loose knot, and the two ends trailing along. Thus, the mass would be concentrated.
Then can there be a post apocalyptic story of stone age people growing up in labyrinths thinking that's all there is to their world. Then the protagonist finds out they are all in the middle of a space tower?
Does this remind anyone of you of the building of the TOWER OF BABYLON ? And look, how this disaster ended . .
Says who?
Glorious Arthursday folks, hopefully its good weather where you are.
We truly need a science fiction series and movies dealing with Isaac Arthur's megastructures and what life like living in that world.
"Sir - may I be excused - my brain is full!" Great episode.
Biggest issue to me is not science or engineering. It is the political and fiscal will to build one or even more than that.
I'm just having a moment of incredulity at the pressure in water and sewerage piping in a 100 mile tower. Personal imagination failure does not make anything impossible, of course, but...wow. Somehow, that's even harder to wrap my head around than the scale of the Horsehead. I mean, it's less than the depth of the Marianas Trench, but even so those are going to be some /immense/ pipes.
The Burj Khalifa ships all of its waste out in trucks, and it's only a small fraction of the height of these concepts.
@@Ducky69247 That's a Dubai thing, nothing to do with towers.
Isaac - at 3:26 I wish you had said ". . . so we envision a vast tether with its center of gravity well beyond geostationary orbit so we can have a zero g space station on it at geostationary altitude and one a g space station out at the counterweight where we can "drop" (actually, fling) spacecraft to the Moon. . Then we can have elevator cars running back and forth to space."
OK, I have to do the numbers for how far out the counterweight will have to be to feel one g outward and whether or not a spacecraft could actually be flung to the Moon from there or even into solar orbit.
No matter what you call it, prepare everything and everyone for the cyclone, typhoon, or hurricane.
2 words: Buckling and wind. The engineering challenges of building a tall, thin building, without some form of active support, are nigh insurmountable. Plus, why would you try this when orbital rings make so much more sense?
If the radiation fins were vertical the heating air around them would move up and push the fins with drag, wouldn't it? Could that do some active suport?
Can't help but wonder what cyclical tidal forces from the moon would do to either the tower (significant mass) or the tether (slightly closer lunar proximity {22k miles isn't nothing} + mass). Likely some significant issues.
Ah yes, DM-Morpheus, great map.
Always looked on these projects as a logistical nightmare wrought in... whatever tensile super materials are in the news this decade.
I loved the partial gravity and the long jumps. What a game.
I was searching for this in the comments section
Just wanted to say FIRST been watching for god.. has it been 8 yearS? Love you bro
What stops these towers from tipping over during contruction?
These are actively-supported structures. The same tech that let's u build hundreds of km up let's u build angled supports like compressive guy wires.
🙌 👏 🙏 🤝 👍 pride comes before the fall ! One single earthquake will finish this. See what happened in turkey recently . . .
@@AL_THOMAS_777 Earthquakes don't happen everywhere.
I once did a little calculation. viennas most populated district is brigittenau with something around 26000 citizen per km², and hydroponics allow feeding up to 50.000 people per square kilometer.
I'm not sure what calculation I exactly did, but austria could host over 2 billion people alone and supply them with food. but good luck with a diet that is comprised of sweet potatoe.
there are bigger countries out there.
the main concern at having such dense populations is: supplying them with energy means, that there needs to be a well engineered cooling system, or otherwise this will just heat up to levels that do not allow people to survive.
So, just spitballing here, but what about using a combination of compressive and tensile strength, where the bottom is supported by compressive strength and the top by tensile?
Toilets! How thick a sewer pipe do you need per person? At 40 flats per floor and 12 cm squared for a very minimal toilet connection, that is about 500 square centimeters per floor. Multiply that by 50,000 floors and you have a requirement for a sewer pipe 2,500 square meters or a square 50 by 50 meters; That is about that 200 foot by 200 foot size specified for the Houston tower. How much square area for all the electrical lines, water for the kitchen, drains to get the bath water returned, air supply and internet connections? Probably far more as you have to get the atmosphere up to the 50,000th floor and then move the stale air out.
You have a near vacuum at perhaps 20 km on up, but it is the same human 15 psi all the way up. That's a HUGE amount of air to move.
You have a lot of heat to dissipate in a vacuum. When the tower is sunlit, how hot will the top stories be?
What about radiation? Effectively, you are in outer space.
At first I thought these would be thin towers with maybe a few 100 sqm per floor but when you described it to be 10 sqkm per floor, my mind was blown to bits. I was lost in thoughts since it's magnitude its beyond imaginations. Tho it sounds crazy you made it sounds plausible in just 300 years. Maybe not 300 but 1000s but if humanity survive that long without destroying ourselves then I'm sure it will be done.
How do the lower floors support the weight of the thousands of floor's above them?
Awesome episode! I love your show. I watch it twice every week. Once when I'm going to bed, (you have a very soothing voice) and then again the next day to get the full jist of it. If I could meet any celebrity it would be you. Do you ever get to Chicago? I drive Uber and I would love to be your driver. Hope you are recovering well from the surgery.
I hused to pass thru Chicago a lot but not in some years :)
LOVE THESE!
Your narration is second to none
Gravity wave technology at 300 floor intervals will allow for really big space scrapers to be built.
I loved the book Horizons Unlimited back when I was in civil air patrol back when I was a kid airforce auxiliary 46046 squad lol back in the 90s,,,good times 😊❤stay safe out there Aloha's
These will all be possible to build when we switch to a continually appreciating currency (ie. When we build our villages, and these structures with a continually appreciating currency).
I love that there are several mitigating factors and detailed considerations for some of the natural questions that I asked when hearing the concept. Some of it I've pondered for a long time, others I had never considered. It's a great resource for someone thinking about sci-fi backstory to some type of narrative story.
But I'm also haunted by the ever-present sense of being a realist (or pessimist, depending on how you see it.) I think there is a near zero chance that anything like an inhabited space elevator will ever come to fruition. I can potentially see something like that being made specifically for satellites or to make certain assemblies in extremely limited capacity sometime in the relatively distant future (centuries.) There are a few very specific reasons for this, which are likely my own bias from my worldview.
Primarily, I think all of this is far too wishful to ever be a viable option. It's going to require an extraordinary amount of time, money, people, resources, international cooperation, and economic/social concessions (where substantial and instrumental resources are diverted away from all across many different portions of global populations to complete/maintain a project of this magnitude.)
Using resources in that way will inevitably negatively impact large amounts of people who are essentially forced into the structure, foregoing their freedoms and entitlements for "the greater good." This is a dangerous road to travel as has been seen in every single other example of socialist/communist/Marxist program ever instituted in history.
And then we get to, by far, the single largest problem with this idea beyond finances/logistics- security. Everyone knows that the bigger something is (in terms of investment, size, vulnerability, economic importance, international cooperation, population density, etc), the bigger a target it becomes. Obviously it would take massive investment in money, personnel, corporate influence, international/foreign policy, physical resources, and so forth to make this a reality. But even if you _COULD_ get basically everyone on Earth to cooperate in this endeavor, there will always be people out there who want to either destroy it or threaten to destroy it for the purposes of extortion. It would be absolutely impossible to protect against any type of intentional attack on a structure of this magnitude. Even today we have people willing to strap dozens of pounds of high explosives to their body to destroy a mud hut or potentially scare ideological adversaries. Nearly every single skyscraper on Earth has been damaged, attacked, or targeted by someone for their own justifications. And with a structure like this, there are obviously serious vulnerabilities in every single system needed for it to function.
If you wanted to harm a town, it would be extremely easy to strap a weapon to a ground-based drone and destroy an electrical substation. Hell, blowing up just 9 key transformer stations (none of which are guarded or protected from any type of attack at any degree) across the United States would destroy the electrical grid and send the entire country back to the pre-19th century for anywhere from 1.5-10 years. That could happen at any moment. Plus you still have to worry about random acts of nature like meteorites, solar flares, GRBs and everything else that we only ATTEMPT to mitigate. And if we pour a substantial amount of our resources into such a massive, monumental task as this, ANY failure of it sets the whole of humanity back. Even if it's simply a freak occurrence beyond our control (like a 1mm meteorite striking a critical system controller or causes a cascade of unavoidable failures), you're looking at large fractions of the global GDP just completely lost, resources gone forever, lives lost, and untold damage to infrastructure built around the logistical needs of it all. That makes the whole thing unstable which can then lead to mass conflict and even interstitial proxy wars fought amongst the survivors.
Basically, I don't think that there would really ever be a point in human history where the cost-benefit analysis of such a structure would enter into "the black." It's putting far too many eggs into one basket and would become a tremendous vulnerability/liability.
If we even survive (as a society) long enough to believe that population density across the entire planet would necessitate a massive space elevator inhabited by millions of people, we would certainly be well beyond the planet's carrying capacity anyway. Since everything is so well connected virtually via the internet, it is much more likely that humanity will be able to simply spread across the land in greater ways and begin expansion by digging downward. Subterranean civilizations are a far more feasible solution to this kind of problem. If we still need to consider some type of space elevator, then it will almost exclusively be used for commercial purposes rather than personal dwellings. Most of the greatest vulnerabilities to upward-built structures are entirely eliminated with sub-surface civilization centers. It's possible that we will begin building most residential and everyday commercial centers underground while utilizing vertical structures above ground for agriculture and livestock. We have a nearly endless supply of rock and an extremely stable parameter set underneath the currently inhabited lands on this planet. "Upward" should be a last resort as it always brings the greatest risk and difficulty over the long term.
Security is all relative. Every day we live with the threat of car accidents, pandemics, severe weather, crime, floods, earthquakes, volcanoes, etc. If the threat of death-by-terrorist-attack (on the particular megastructure that you're trying to lease out floorspace in) is offset by a substantially reduced risk of dying from other causes (say crime, pandemic, and floods) then the security problem is effectively solved.
Just an idea but for the elevator conundrum couldn’t you build something like a straight up and down ski lift with multiple elevators on the same cable, with some entrances going up and other entrances catching the elevator on the way back down?
Reminds me of the colonizing titan Unity episode! That's one of my all-time favorite episodes!
So excited for the upcoming episodes
They all sound like they’ll give us a lot to think about, which are my favorite kind of episodes.
Saudi Arabia: "Write this down!"
Some interesting visions, but more suited to a dystopian sci-fi story (of which there are too many already) rather than a likely reality. Realistically, a basic launch loop and rotating orbital habitats would be far more practical, with no unobtainium required. Modular networks beat heirarchical structures every time.
There would definitely be advantages to building a building that's 160+ kilometers tall. One of them is provided you had vertical farms inside the building, an asteroid impact or volcanism severe enough to block out the sun and cause a volcanic winter, like the one that happened in the 540's CE, it wouldn't send humanity back to the dark ages.
A lot of large scale projects seem to work best when they have a repeatability that allows replication of something like a tower many times. To make this many pressurized towers would require such enormous quantity of material that it would not be possible without first mining asteroids or the Kuiper belt like the previous video. I think constructing a large tower on Earth or a planet of a similar magnitude will not be possible until we find a large enough source of energy required to transmit energy across the solar system. Maybe we will see something like this tower on the moon before the Earth. Cool video
24:59, could you please explain what the hell a "birch planet" is? Was it covered in a different video at some point? I am having trouble comprehending a structure a light WEEK wide and a billion billion worlds big. That is much bigger than a DYSON'S SPHERE in fiction or Ring World. I think its even bigger than an Alderson disc? Could you maybe do an entire episode ON JUST THAT or at least give us a link that goes into more detail? When I googoled megastructures I found Dyson's Sphere, Ring World, and Alderson Disc and then some things smaller than those but what you described makes no sense to me. No physical structure could be THAT BIG. Are you just making it up as you go along or is there a precedent for it??
It was covered in the Mega Earths episode. That specific part starts at 20:07. A shorter description was also in the Megastructure Compendium episode.
@@UpliftedCapybara I just saw the description but its going over my head. It makes the Dyson's Sphere from the RELICS 2 part episode of Star Trek Next Gen seem insignificant by comparison. I cannot comprehend a physical construct being THAT BIG. Even the society that built the Dyson's Sphere (I think the novel called them the Iconians) would not be able to fully comprehend it. I think its BILLIONS of times bigger than the Dyson's sphere? I want him to do an entire episode on JUST THAT ONE ITEM.
These series is mind boggling and jsut wow!. your voice is good too
9:13 wait, who says we must fill the space of the buildings with the maximum number of people possible?, a tiny fraction of those millians of people would be more than enough to maintain the towers and that way you dont have regular problams with blocked pasages up or down the tower which would defeat hte point of them in the first place.
The facehugger as alien safety gear gone rogue is a much more interesting origin than the later films.
When I grow up, I wanna be as impressive as Arthur.
I always wondered about this, love the video❤
I wonder, if the foundation for such gigaton structures with such small footprints would have to be pontons swimming in earths mantle or would have to be grounded on earths core itself. I imagine the isostatic displacement would turn the surrounding area into some bowl the tower might never outgrow, if it was founded on the crust.
Great Presentation - interesting and informative.
Excellent episode! Ive been wondering about developments in material sciences, and if ee have the technology to build pyramids reaching above the atmosphere.
These remind me of what Roy was describing in Bladerunner. In Orion.
Might be worth exploring how big you would have to make a pyramid for the top to reach into space
What angle is the slope of the pyramid.
@@catprog Fair question... How about whatever is physically possible?
Could these towers be constructed and supported by different balloons inside and surrounding like vertically positioned airships or would they become to susceptable to wind and risk of collapsing ?
That can be done, and the wind problem could be solved by essentially tying the balloons to the tower, but you wouldn’t want to have that as your only source of levitation.
Instead of building up from the ground... why not build down from geostationary orbit from space down to a few meters above the ground where it is stationed? Doesn't have to touch... it just have to be close. Jump up a few meters... and the rest is an elevator ride up. Can use sensors on the part next to earth to help detect corrections to orbit that need to be made to stay over a particular spot.
It is just a satellite with a skinny bit really close to the ground. Still need super materials to make it like carbon nanotubes and carbon fiber and what not, but you don't have to worry about being connected per se.
I wonder if we think of a space tower as two structures. One that is supported from the ground up that meets a tower like a space elevator supported from space down. That would cut down on the material strength needed for each to reach space. Or why not make a space tower supported from space say down to 200K feet ish from the ground. We then take a aircraft or rocket from the ground to meet that space tower on a platform. to make the rest of the trip.
Every study I've seen of space elevators aka beanstalks has them get wider, not narrower, as they rise, with the widest part at orbital height, where the tension is the greatest. Why does the Sundial taper as it rises?
Given the idea that building sky scrapers only makes sense when the land you build on is too expensive to expand horizontally ... it makes me think space habitats would only make sense when natural land prices on Earth (or elsewhere?) is so expensive you have to build your own land to build those buildings on.
If covering the Earth with sky scrapers could support on the order of 100 trillion people by the calculations in this video, I wonder I wounder what the human population would have to be in order for the creation of a space habitat would be cheaper than building more or taller sky scrapers.
Space infrastructure for energy, manufacturing, and mining has several advantages, so I wouldn't be surprised if space habitats become cost effective before heat dissipation becomes a limiting factor for earths population. Especially since it has mobility advantages and allows egocentric individuals to build their own personal worlds both of which can justify significantly higher costs than buying land on earth.
24:52 Would time run slower with all that mass in every direction?
I don't know.
Would be a nice view. I usually enjoy a view in an elevator
I'd love to see the engineering calculations for the foundations on a building like this. I'm just not sure how you would go about doing this, I mean a structure with the weight of a billion trillion tons seems to be beyond our current abilities.
Tie it to an asteroid in Geosynchronous orbit.
Use the asteroid to " pull up" on the structure, thus taking some of the weight.
@@patrickkenyon2326 Even if you took 1/2 the weight, I still think it's beyond current technology.
@@mcconkeyb NASA has a team looking into it.
If it could be done, it would pay for itself by giving us access to the asteroid belt.
I watched Ad Astra that's a scene early on with the space tower... I'd this idea that instead of wirelessly beaming photovoltaic electricity we'd have towers dotted across the landscape or seascape instead and what would happen is the tower spews out some gas conducive to complete a circuit while the other half of the circuit is a space tether at vleo - capacitor banks up high and down low with the arrangement providing pulsed power as tethers pass towers at eight kms-1. I'm guessing sixty kilometres for tether and tower and the same lightning gap to give one eighty kilometres total but the gap might be less since it will all depend on atmosphere breathing electric propulsion too to stabilise or maintain tether attitude and position etc..
It's maybe also alluded to in star trek the new movie with the tethered space drill
Today we built up into the heavens, but what about digging down into hell? How deep can we tunnel? Heat is an obvious bottlekneck, and the immense pressures of even just a few dozen meters of dirt and rock can't be overstated.
Yet mining operations and even some caves can be found multiple kilometers underground.
Consider a network of balloons tethered to each other; and an active system to control the buoyancy to each element such that the individual forces between nodes on that tether never exceeds engineering constraints; combine this with orbital rings.