OT: About Space Elevators

[Taz-in-Space]

What I want to know is how they are going to ground the darn thing. Electricly. Isn't there an electrical charge difference between earth's surface and high altitude? Sounds to me like this would be the Mother of all Lightning Rods!

Who needs terrorists when NATURE itself will take care of the problem.

[Phoenix-D]

Just being that tall would make it the mother of all lightning rods, to say nothing of all the interesting effects it might have on global weather (and vice versa).

However, planes can take direct hits from lightning and keep going; if the car is on the outside, or cleared before a storm, I don't think a hit would do THAT much.

Phoenix-D

[dogscoff]

I can imagine a little (huge) oceanic platform where cargo liners (and maybe cruise ships) come to load and unload cargo,

Heh, that's a good point. HOw to get stuff to/ from the floating platform? Boats, sure, but boats are slow. It would be quite ironic if something this high tech revitalised some older technologies like flying boats & airships.

[Dragon of the void]

Good point about the lightning, Taz.

MAybe they yould even use this power that comes down the cable, it just has to be strong enough. Thus you would not need to "ground" it, you channel the current into your battery.

[dumbluck]

D of the V: Man, that's one honkin battery your talking about!!! Do they even make batteries with that kind of capacity? CAN they even make batteries with that kind of capacity????

[dogscoff]

MAybe they yould even use this power that comes down the cable, it just has to be strong enough. Thus you would not need to "ground" it, you channel the current into your battery.

Well, if memory serves me correctly, according to Dr Emmet Brown ot the Back to the Future series, a lightening strike supplies exactly 1.21 jiggerwatts of electricity, which happens to be the exact amount needed to send a sports car into the past. So you could actually go up the cable in Australia at 9 in the morning and come down in Europe at midday in 1955.

Seriously, I should think the cable would actually do away with lightning in the area altogether... As I understand it, lightning is when static electricity builds up at cloud level to such an extent that it has to find the route of least resistance to the ground.
With a permanent link between the ground and all levels of the atmosphere, (and I'm not sure but I think bucky carbon would be a pretty good conductor) surely the static would be constantly conducting itself to ground and so there would never be enough built up to form an arc (lightening). Ummm...

You can tell I haven't studied science in 10 years!

[Spoo]

the static would be constantly conducting itself to ground

Even better for powering the thing if you have a constant current.