I have had a number of coments around my space elevator idea, but no one has yet identified the biggest flaw!

It was raining again this morning which gave me a good chance to think about this idea again (refer to yesterdays entry for why it needs to be raining). It occured to me yesterday that the higher you get, the weaker the effect of gravity, so the further apart the disks would float, however I realised that when this is taken to the extreme then the is zero gravity. Of course at this point the top disk will be pushed away from the one before it, but there would be nothing to hold it back so it would just be pushed out into space.

But when you think about it, the one below it is actually being pushed outwards bow the one below that and so on. In order to be able to make it off the ground the acceleration provided by each disk would need to be greater than 10ms-2 (ie gravity is 9.8ms-2 downwards so to lift the disk above it each magnet would need to provide at least this upwards).

So… working on the assumptions that the average distance between each magnet would be 10m (to give a highish estimate) and that the edge of space is roughly 100 km. The esculator would contain roughly 10,000 disks, each of which would be exerting an acceleration force of 10ms-2 on the one above it, and gravity would have an average effect of -5ms-2 on each disk – giving a net average force of acceleration of +5ms-2 per disk. This means that the combined force of acceleration exerted on the top disk would be 50,000ms-2. So basically if this was attempted, the top disk would be accelerated out of the end of the esculator at about (working on a decreasing rate of acceleration spread over 3 seconds) at approximatley 75,000m/s (approx 270,000Kph)!!!! That would be enough force to push a large magentic disc right through the moon and out the other side (a hardly loose any speed in the process)! Actually, at this speed, the giagantic magnetic disk would heat up well beyond melting point and would turn into a high speed molten flash of devistation!!!

In short, rather than making a giant esculator, we would in actual fact be making the biggest [ rail gun ] that would be big enough to literally blow up planets.

In actual fact, this may be even better, however if we were to build this we would ovbiously also need some guy named Vader who breathes funny and owns a man made planet that he calls ‘the star of death’ or similar.