elevator or fountain?

Which do you think is going to happen first? Space elevator or space fountain? Why?

elevator - simpler in concept

Neither.  The West will sink into a long state of decay, and space advancement will stop.  Soon enough, launchings will be given over to civilizations along the equator who are less gayfaggotly concerned about their stock options.  These equatorial civilizations will do launchings for cash, but soon enough (within 50 to 70 years) they will succumb to eating their own bellies.  Overall space advancement will come to a halt.  Satellites will go offline one by one.  Warlords will become prevalent across the world, giving Humanity something to be very concerned with over anything happening in the sky.  Then, a long period of near-tribalism will begin, running several centuries, perhaps a millennium.  After that, civilization will continue to decline and Humanity will never again reach beyond the atmosphere.

I for one welcome this new age of imperialism.

>>3
Ah, the bright future of humanity. Do you see peak oil as the catalyst for this?

I believe that nuclear power will catalyze a new drive for near space exploration as we will quickly begin to use up cheap sources of uranium. Asteroid mining will drive a demand for space elevator technology. Colonization of Mars will follow as overpopulation and dwindling resources drive people away from Earth. And then it's the bright future of the 50s.

>>5
Peak oil is certainly part of it.  However, Humanity has painted itself into a corner of sorts.  It's not just oil.  A lot of the easily-obtained resources have been partially to wholly depleted.  No, we'll never actually "run out of oil" ... it's just that each additional barrel of oil must cost more to extract than the last.  Over the next decades of the 21st Century, that truth will become more and more apparent until even the most doltish of deniers (like Rush Limbaugh) will have to admit that you don't need to actually run out of oil in order to practically run out of oil

Like I said, it's not must oil.  The cheap extractions of strategic metals like copper, gold and chromium have already been done.  What remains is larger or more involved operations to filter out those metals from poorer ores.  That will just drive up the costs.  Eventually, we won't be able to afford to use platinum in our catalytic converters.  What happens then?  well, our civilization as we know it will degrade by yet another notch point.

We have the ability NOW to drive technological expansion such that we actually do expand general Human civilization into space.  However, that can't be done while people would rather put investment capital into useless enterprises, like stock and bonds.  In order to achieve space, we have to do all that unsexy manufacturing stuff, and at a low (primarily, losing) margin.  The end product will take a lot longer to pay off ... and when it does, by hauling a trillion-ton asteroid into Earth orbit, it will do so handsomely.  But what Western investor will make a 30-year investment at such high risk, no matter how many trillions such an asteroid is worth even on a glutted metals market?

Hence:  THE WEST HAS FORGOTTEN HOW TO EXPAND A CIVILIZATION.  And so, it will fall, and the bailiwick will be passed to another civilization.  However, the disease of financial greed has infected much of Humanity.  If a civilization like China manages to inherit the world, they will have a tiny window of opportunity in which to expand Humanity outward beyond the atmosphere.  In my opinion, that window is just too small.  Some might argue that that window doesn't actually exist since a nation of China has started off on the wrong foot from the beginning, since it expects to engage in investment frauds immediately.

>>6
I'm mostly hoping for the new IT billionaires, who are, by and large wealthier and more likely to take risks than past rich people, will pick up the torch and get our infrastructure underway. We still have time to show the populace that space isn't just a place for a few astronauts to do zero g experiments. I like the idea of using a space-tourism company to bootstrap more serious endeavors, and I think it could work. I guess only time will tell whether they will have time before this shit really starts hitting the fan.

Enjoy your space cancer

>>1
What is a space fountain?

>>6
It is not impossible for the west to maintain the status quo without further expansion.  That's the whole point of conservation.  The sun outputs a ton of energy; if we can harvest a larger portion of it, we'd be set.  I make no claim that doing so is easy; I'm only claiming that it's not impossible.

You forgot to mention that space exploration takes a LOT of energy.  We don't know yet if it takes less energy to harvest asteroids or to refine low quality ores.  You also forgot to consider risks associated with harvesting asteroids.  A calculational error may send that asteroid into Moscow, instead of staying in orbit for you to harvest the minerals.  I don't think Moscow will be very forgiving of your calculational errors.

The disease of financial greed is what caused all of imperial expansion in the last ~2000 years.  Colonialism was all about exploiting natural resources in another locale.

>>9
The space fountain concept is a proposed form of space elevator that does not require the structure to be in geosynchronous orbit, and does not rely on tensile strength for support. In contrast to the original space elevator design (a tethered satellite), a space fountain is a tremendously tall tower extending up from the ground. Since such a tall tower could not support its own weight using traditional materials, massive pellets are projected upward from the bottom of the tower and redirected back down once they reach the top, so that the force of redirection holds the top of the tower aloft. Satellite payloads ascend or descend by coupling with this stream of pellets or by climbing up the side of the tower. The space fountain has several key advantages over a space elevator in that it doesn't require materials with extreme strength, can be located at any point on a planet's surface instead of just the equator, and can be raised to any height required. Its major disadvantage is that it is an active structure, and so requires constant power input to remain aloft.
[wiki]

http://www.strangehorizons.com/2003/20030714/orbital_railroads.shtml

harvesting uranium would be enough to offset the cost of mining other useful minerals an asteroid may contain.. sure, calculational error could cause a disaster, but if minerals are mined on the asteroid itself, mass can be easily calculated securely. once we got an elevator or fountain, the energy cost would be minimal compared to the net gain of mining asteroids

Risks aside, you're only emphasizing my point.  Why hasn't the Capitalist West tried to harvest at least solar energy with Solar Power Satellites as well documented and envisioned during the O'Neill era?  The answer is that the West is now eating its own belly and prefers to seek profits in that fashion other than expanding the civilization.  The asteroid belt contains a large multiple of Humanity's current wealth -- at least 3 orders of magnitude.  Do I really need to spell out that it's a pure investment decision to spend a trillion dollars now in order to access 1000 times Humanity's current wealth, as represented in the Asteroid Belt?  You'd think that that was a no-brainer.  Investment consortiums should have been formed and should have raced to build launching methods in order to exploit that huge wealth base.

But we didn't.  Our civilization instead failed mentally and preferred to engage in fraud and war in order to make a few more millionaires and billionaires.  These "great men" (hah!) lacked the moral fiber to understand that they could become trillionaires from exploiting the resources of Earth's orbit, the Moon, and then the Asteroid Belt.

Enjoy your space AIDS

>>10
Given the strength of the earth's gravitational pull, I'd say such a thing would require tremendous amounts of power (almost certainly not worth it), and a power failure would mean total collapse.  In addition, strong tensile material is still required because only the part near where the projectiles recoil experience an upwards force.  The intermediate material feels a pull in both directions, and is likely to be torn apart.  A possible counter is to chunk the structure into multiple units, each sending pellets to the unit above.

>>11
Exploiting existing resources: small investments, low risk, high gain
Exploiting new resources: enormous investments, enormous risk, enormous gain

Given that most executives aren't ready to randomly blow a few billions dollars on such projects, it should not be surprising that these projects are still mostly non existent.

The other thing that needs to be determined is the constitution of these asteroids.  Wikipedia suggests that most of these contain large amounts of carbon or silicon compounds, which are useless, given their abundance on earth.  Even the metal ones are only useful if they're a solid block of metal.  If they're some oxide compound of metals, then they're just like most other earth rocks, and would take a tremendous amount of energy to purify (which is why metal refineries don't attempt to refine any random rock they see).

>>11
you blatant, blatant faggot.

>>13
The nickel-iron asteroids are basically components of the interior of a planet.  That means they are extraordinarily metal-rich.  Literally, a nickel-iron meteorite is a chunk of nickel-iron, as nickel and iron, among other trace metals.  Hence, a metallic asteroid is literally a miles-wide chunk of metal, with inclusions of rock.

As for purification/smelting, just use the sun.  Build a huge mirror (tens of miles wide should be OK) and focus it upon the smelting zone.  Free energy.  We don't call it a star for nothing!

As for investment, I think you're underestimating the ROI difference between the two.  Let me state it again:  the Asteroid Belt contains about as much wealth as is represented by 1000 Human civilizations ... at least!  With regard to current usage of materials, mining the Asteroid Belt would be like finding an infinite mine of metals, semi-metals and carbonaceous materials.  That means no matter where you go in the Belt, you can just reach out your mining business and start processing terawealth.

Of course, Flatlanders (i.e. Earthbound folk) are literally too stupid to realize all that.  THAT's why they prioritize selling fraudulent financial products to fellow Flatlanders.  They live at the bottom of a modest gravity well and think nothing for what's at the top of it.

>>15
http://www.imo2007.edu.vn/index.php?module=ViewResultByCountry.php

It is curious that you should mention the term "flatlanders", most of the reasearch I have done has lead me to believe the Earth is actually flat. The mechanism for "gravitation" is actually an upward acceleration of the (flat) Earth at 9.8 m/s^2. You can imagine the kind of velocity the Earth has built up over the 6,000 or so years of it existance, because of this fact, leaving the Earth would require such an immense amount of energy it is impossible to do so.

>>17
lol

"it's turtles all the way down"

>>17
"most"

>>19
The ratio of the number of things which totally disprove the theory vs. number of things which doesn't falls within the expected range of variation.

>>15
If we had such a mirror, and a Stirling engine, we'd be done with our energy problems.

If the risk and minimal investment are large enough, no amount of potential reward is sufficient.