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I suppose if you have the ability to shift Phobos out to an altitude of 17000kms, you should be able to nudge its present orbit just sufficiently to make encounters with the elevator cable very rare.
    Calculations could be done to find out almost exactly when the next encounter was due and you could simply nudge Phobos into yet another orbit as the need arose.
    Such nudges may prove to be necessary only every century or so - probably easier than having the cable oscillating backwards and forwards to avoid impacts. Besides, flexing the cable too many times could eventually cause fatigue - if not in the carbon filaments themselves, then perhaps in the rails and cables attached.

    Just a thought.     

Cindy writes:-

    I know just what you mean! And what a perfectly poetic way you have of expressing it, too ... "word salad".
                                   

Bill writes:-

    Actually, Bill, that's not strictly true.
    In the American system of units, a pint is certainly 16 fl. ozs and, therefore, weighs a pound. And a U.S. gallon, being 8 pints, weighs 8 lbs.
    However, in the British imperial system, a pint is 20 fl.ozs - one and a quarter pounds! (A British gallon weighing in at 10 lbs.)

    Please forgive this outburst ... I tend to suffer with occasional bouts of pedantry and couldn't resist the urge to be pernickety about this!!   

Hi Dicktice!
    A very interesting post.
    Especially the bit about reducing launch costs to orbit from $10,000 to $100 per pound ... music to my ears!

    I just wish they'd stop talking about these things and GET ON WITH IT !!
                                       

Cindy writes:-

    Yes ma'am ... as many as you like!! And may you drink them in the best of good health!
                                   

So, does this mean Josh and Clark agree that strong immigration laws are necessary to keep out all the "desperate individuals"?
    Well then, I think I can agree too. Helping third world countries to reach first world standards is a worthwhile (even necessary) pursuit - for our ultimate security as well as our consciences.
    Allowing unfettered entry of millions of "desperate individuals" into countries like America, Australia, France, Britain etc. must cause economic chaos. In the end, the ability of the first world countries to assist the third world will be seriously undermined. Everybody will suffer.

    Once upon a time, back in the seventies from memory, a think-tank headed by a rotund gentleman called Herman Kahn (IQ measurement off the scale, but believed to be well over 200) came to the paradoxical-sounding conclusion that the only way to ensure the prosperity of the world's poor was to encourage the rich to become as rich as possible!
    The notion that wealth can or should be spread out evenly was dismissed as counterproductive and, given human greed, declared totally impracticable. That way lies mediocrity and universal impoverishment, they decided.
    The idea they came up with was that a proportion of humanity, becoming super- then mega- then hyper-rich would be like an updraft of warm air. It pulls air up into the relative vacuum beneath it. As the cast-offs of the hyper-rich filter down to the poorer classes, they become richer too. There will always be a differential and it will be greater even than the differential we see today between living standards in America and Somalia. But the poorest of the poor will eventually reach current U.S standards of income, nutrition, education and medical care - and then, greatly surpass it.

    An example was given of poor Mexicans driving 15 or 20 year-old Cadillacs. Half a century earlier, the luxury afforded by an ageing Cadillac would have been beyond the dreams of even the average U.S. citizen, never mind a poor Mexican!

    With unimaginable wealth being created - even if only for the top few percent of the world's people - money becomes available for investment in new technology of all sorts. [Contrary to popular opinion, rich people don't keep their money in a large shoe-box under the bed! It's put into banks, share markets, business ventures, etc.] New and better technology is the answer to so many of our problems. Just look at what Information Technology has done in creating the global village and in making education increasingly available to children in remote and poor areas.

    When the poorest people on the planet have access to a lifestyle better than current first world standards, they won't need to sell their daughters into slavery of any kind. They won't be desperately risking their lives to cross borders illegally, either - life at home will be too comfortable for that!

    Well? Waddya think of Herman's scheme? It's always made a lot more sense to me than all that left-wing twaddle.
                                     

I really don't know if I'm supposed to, or not, but I can't see anything artificial in these pictures.
    I've had this trouble before, with pictures submitted last year by a gentleman called Tripp McCann. The first of your pictures, a high magnification image, is very similar to the ones Tripp thought were proof-positive of alien structures in Valles Marineris. The trouble is, when you magnify images to the nth degree, artifacts of the image making process start to predominate and our human tendency to see patterns where there aren't any creates shapes out of 'noise'.

    I must be particularly bereft of the human ability to find these patterns because I can see nothing here that even looks artificial!! And, if I did, I'd be unlikely to take it seriously for the reasons I've outlined above.

    I'm not a dyed-in-the-wool skeptic about everything I see but I think I do have quite high 'standards of evidence'. And I believe, as the late great Carl Sagan exhorted us to do, that we should maintain a healthy skepticism at all times.
    It's a fine line between skepticism and Luddite debunkery, I know. And I freely admit I'm still curious about the Face at Cydonia and I can't fathom why NASA and others in the 'mainstream' imagine Mars could be sterile. So I'm not one to toe the party line.

    But in this case, I feel confident in stating my opinion that this is just bunk!! (No offence intended.)
                                     

Yeah, sure. You're only 26. We believe you ...

    Just kidding!!
    HAPPY BIRTHDAY MARSGUY2012 !!!     

Yeah ... well, I'm .. er, "following this thread ,too ...", Cindy, as you so optimistically put it!!
    If you need any moral support in the 'struggling department', I'm right there with you, kiddo!!
                                        :laugh:

    I often plow my way through articles on this kind of thing in publications like "Discover" and "New Scientist". I usually end up with the same dull pain in my head as I got just now reading Robert's dimensional tour-de-force! Not that I mean any slight against Robert - on the contrary, I am impressed as usual by the scope of his knowledge. No, I fear the whole problem lies in my head, and with the hardware it contains, rather than with the software Robert provides! 

    I've never come across the notion that gravity results from "partially collapsed" dimensions. I assume it must be part of Robert's "flexible-dimension" theory - and I'm not even going to ask about that!!
    Sounds interesting though.

    Years ago on a British T.V. science show called "Horizon", they described matter as just 'pinched up energy'. I decided that was something I could live with because it's not too hard to imagine huge quantities of energy waves getting bundled up together and squished into a small volume - voila! - matter! 
    As for your question, Cindy, as to how or why some energy stayed energy and other energy got compressed into matter ... I never thought to ask! I know that some time after the big bang, the universe cooled enough for matter to condense out of the fireball of energy. And I know there are smart people who have devised mathematical models for that early time which predict how much hydrogen and how much helium should have been produced. Current estimates for the abundance of those elements in the universe today, mesh well with the theoretical amounts calculated, too.
    So, those models would presumably also explain why or how a certain percentage of the initial available energy became matter. But then again, there are now question marks over other forms of energy - the so-called 'dark energy'.
    Maybe nobody really knows the answer to your question yet!        ???

So, what are we trying to achieve here?
    Are we looking at releasing a 50 tonne rocket(fuel and payload) from the track at an altitude of, say, 5 kilometres and a speed of Mach 0.9?
    If so, what will be the final mass to reach LEO?

    And will this be cheaper in electricity and amortised infrastructure costs than, say, the Soyuz workhorse - pound for pound or kilogram for kilogram?

Hi Cindy!
    Black holes are very weird things to the minds of us humans - I think they're even weird to the minds of superhumans like Stephen Hawking and Paul Davies!!   :laugh:

    As you know, black holes are collapsed stars. At the end of their life, when they can no longer extract energy from fusion processes, the long battle between gravity and fusion power comes to an end. As was always inevitable, gravity wins!
    As the star collapses, its matter becomes denser as its radius becomes smaller. And as the radius becomes smaller, the matter becomes denser. (A positive feedback loop.) If there's up to 1.44 solar masses of material present (the Chandrasekhar Limit), gravity will create a white dwarf star - a 'solar cinder', if you like, which will radiate weakly for tens of billions of years, ever so gradually dimming and cooling until it finally dies.
    [Our Sun will do this, so we could move outwards, planet by planet, as it goes through its red giant stage, and then build habitats out of the wreckage of the solar system and huddle them in tight orbits near our new white dwarf star! ... But I digress.]
    Beyond 1.44 solar masses, gravity is sufficiently strong to overcome quantum mechanical rules which say no two electrons may occupy the same state - this point is called electron degeneracy ( ... just imagine all those debauched little electrons disobeying all the rules and occupying the same state!! I can almost guarantee alcohol and drugs are involved!     )  So, the star proceeds to collapse further by becoming just a logjam of neutrons - a neutron star.
    If the matter exceeds about 2 solar masses (I believe there is some room for error in this figure and it could be as much as 3.5 solar masses.), then we reach the point known as neutron degeneracy (more debauchery!! ). At this stage, even the quantum mechanical rules which forbid neutrons blending into each other break down ( ... I just knew there'd be smut involved!! )

    Now the collapsing star has jumped the last hurdle. There is now no force in the universe that can resist the collapse of this star's matter down into a mathematical point of infinite density. This point is called a singularity.
    The closer you get to this singularity, the more powerful its gravity becomes. At a certain distance from it, the acceleration is so enormous that even light fails to escape. This boundary distance is called the event horizon - because beyond it, whatever happens is forever concealed from our view. We can never obtain any information from within that boundary and, therefore, we can never see a 'naked singularity' or measure any of its properties.
    In fact, within the event horizon, our universe doesn't really exist! It's essentially meaningless trying to visualise what it's like in there because it's a region where the rules we understand and live by out here, no longer apply.
    If you like, you can speculate about matter which has accelerated through the event horizon. Since it has reached light speed at the event horizon, its mass is now infinite and, from our point of view, time no longer passes for the atoms in it (not that we can view those atoms anyway, of course! ). Even though its mass is infinite, it is now encountering a rapidly increasing gravitational field as it approaches the singularity. As this unimaginable gravitational field exerts its influence on the matter, can it accelerate it further? ... Can an infinitely powerful gravitational field accelerate an infinite mass?!!
                                   

    Since my own description of black holes is beginning to make me dizzy, this is where I get off!
    That stuff about matter being "crushed out of existence" is really just a convenient way of describing the indescribable!! In a manner of speaking, once matter crosses the event horizon, it is "out of existence" - at least as far as this universe is concerned. Some people have speculated that the matter which disappears into a black hole in this universe, emerges out of a 'white hole' in another universe! But, again, there's no conceivable way of verifying this notion experimentally because no information can emerge from beyond the event horizon.

    This subject is so mind-numbingly difficult to comprehend that I have nothing but the most awed and reverent respect for the theoretical physicists who tackle it and devise mathematical models to describe it! And it makes me all the more certain of, and humbled by, my own profound ignorance! There is a small group of people in this world who stand out from humanity as a Cro-Magnon must have stood out among Neanderthals.
    Sobering stuff. But, for the sake of us Neanderthals, thank God they're there!!
                                     

Thanks, NuclearSpace.
    I would be most interested to hear Dr. Herndon's opinions about the hypothetical behaviour of a Mars reactor core, assuming such a thing exists.
                                 

Cindy writes:-

    Relax Cindy. Those guys are busy chasing me ... I'm rarely more than two steps ahead of 'em!!!