Last post I ended with asking what’s next. Well, here it is. Those insane, oil-rich Arabs in Dubai found a new way to waste money and endanger the planet. They plan to drag a large asteroid into near-Earth stationary orbit over Dubai and attach a mass of cables to it that will be used to support a skyscraper that will hang from the cables. They’re calling it a “Spacescraper”.
The weight of the “spacescraper” will have to be constantly balanced against the speed of the asteroid, which must increase to generate more outward pull as the building’s increasing weight from construction and then habitation pulls more and more toward the Earth. In the short term, small increases will show little effect but over the long term, this is cumulative.
The more weight increase of the building, the more stress on the cables, which will also be used as a “space elevator” to move freight up to orbital height. A principle of this is that at the midpoint of the cable, objects on the elevator will stop being pulled downward by gravity and as they move farther up the cable they’ll be pulled outward by centrifugal force and will need to be braked. This braking action can be used to generate electric power that can be stored and applied to the lifting motors, making this not self-sustaining but partially so.
I read about this in my youth, it was expounded on by one of the great Sci-fi writers at the time, Bradbury or Asimov, I think.
Now, the Big Problem with this plan is that one of maintaining a balance between the pull toward Earth of the building and all that cable, and the pull outward of the asteroid. What will be the critical point of inward or outward motion before it’s too late to correct it? Because there will be one if this is built.
There’s a lot of junk out there in low orbit, what if something hit just one of the cables? This is an easy scenario. The load absorbed by that cable is now transferred to the rest of them. They should be built to take it and more, but what if a bunch of them were sheared? Down comes the building, away flies the asteroid, in an outward orbit that everyone hopes doesn’t bring it back to us.
What would be the magnitude of the disaster if the asteroid crashes into the Earth? Could it become an Extinction Event? If it pulled away from Earth, the thousands of people in that building would get a fine view of the blackness of space before the vacuum killed them all.
But what a fine place to leap to your death from, to be the first to commit suicide this way. Someone will, others will follow suit, how do they keep the corpses from splattering all over the people below? What about people throwing things out the windows, it’s a long way down, it would be like bombs going off when things hit the sidewalk.
There’s a limit to what we should allow each other to do to attract attention to ourselves and one-up each other, and I think they found it. When people have themselves surgically mutilated to look like cats or devils, that’s one thing, it doesn’t threaten the rest of us, but when they start moving huge asteroids into near-Earth orbit, they need to limit it to mining purposes because the more that’s taken away from their space rock the farther away from us it will move, in it’s orbit. It’s inevitable that with this, it will keep coming closer unless something severs the cables.
A space elevator, if now achievable with advanced high-tensile-strength materials, would be a wonderful thing and you wouldn’t need a giant asteroid to counter-balance it that would threaten all humanity. A small, much safer one would do just fine, with a device to sever the cable close to the asteroid, just in case. One you can dangle a huge skyscraper from is just plain nuts.
