This week's [i]What If?[/i] question was "Is there enough energy to move the entire current human population off-planet?" This is fairly relevant to EP considering The Fall, so I'm passing it on.
Also mentioned is Project Orion, a brilliantly insane method of propulsion involving atomic bombs.
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Amount of energy required to move the human population off-planet
Tue, 2012-08-14 11:01
#1
Chevre
Amount of energy required to move the human population off-planet
![http://boxall.no-ip.org/img/bar_userbar.jpg[/img]](http://boxall.no-ip.org/img/bar_userbar.jpg[/img]){kind=link}
Tue, 2012-08-14 16:39
#2
Arenamontanus
Some very useful quick
Some very useful quick calculations there. This is yet another reason to live on Titan, where the escape velocity is low.
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Thu, 2012-08-16 12:06
#3
Chevre
If you don't mind living
If you don't mind living somewhere where the atmosphere is both unbreathable and cold enough to freeze you instantly, sure. I'll take my 21% oxygen and wide range of climates, thank you.
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[img]http://boxall.no-ip.org/img/bar_userbar.jpg[/img]
Thu, 2012-08-16 17:02
#4
athanasius
no problem..
EP Earth had at lest 3 space elevators an a lot of D-He3 power, i'm poor at math but i suppose they can cheaply lift all neded for O'Neill and Stanford constructions and mantinence.
During Fall the problem was the time, the trip to GEO is long and the elevator have a limited number of elevators.
[url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator_economics]costs for space elevator[/url]
[url=http://setis.ec.europa.eu/newsroom-items-folder/nuclear-fusion-power-gen... cost of fusion energy[/url]
Fri, 2012-08-17 06:59
#5
Arenamontanus
Yes, the throughput of a
Yes, the throughput of a beanstalk is pretty low. I have not seen any proper calculations, but typically each capsule is depicted as having up to a 100 passengers and separated by a long distance from the next.
If we assume the elevator is like a high-speed train fully filled across its length, then it would be moving a few hundred km/h (it is limited by the slow speeds in the atmosphere) with 4 passengers per 2 meters. 2 passengers per meter times 400 km/h equals 222 passengers per second. So in a day, assuming this fully filled cable with no interruptions, you could life 19 million people. Evacuating 7 billion using three cables like this takes 121 days.
This is an upper limit: I suspect the necessary logistics makes things one or two orders of magnitude less efficient. Just imagine getting 19 million people to go anywhere together in a day - it takes several days just to evacuate a few hundred thousand people from an endangered location.
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