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Raising a Ladder to the Moon, Under the Sea
- larkeith 7y ago(2017)
- fgheorghe 7y agoYet spain still lags behind most other countries in terms of internet connection speeds.
- cstuder 7y agoNo thread on submarine cables is complete without a link to Neal Stephensons classic "Mother Earth Mother Board" article: https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/ https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/
- chrisweekly 7y agoHey @cstuder, THANK YOU for that link! I've been a Stephenson fan for decades, and had a Wired subscription for several years, yet somehow never came across this article till just now. Saved it to finish reading later, but had to come back and thank you. So good! :)
- harry-wood 7y agoAm I the only one who was disappointed that this wasn't an article about a plan to actually raise a ladder to the moon?
- kwhitefoot 7y agoNo, there are at least two of us!
- Galaxeblaffer 7y agomake that three
- brujoand 7y agoAnd my axe!
- jve 7y agohttps://what-if.xkcd.com/157/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/157/
- aflag 7y agoI'm also agonizing in disappointment.
- balabaster 7y agoWhile this would indeed have been amusing, given the moon's orbit of the earth, how would this be possible?
- accnumnplus1 7y agoA rope ladder hanging from the moon. (Not quite "raising", and ignoring a bunch of other details.)
- balabaster 7y agoI wonder if it got caught on a mountain or something equally robust it could stop the moon's orbit. I wonder what, aside from the tides, this would affect.
- jstanley 7y agoYou would need quite the rope ladder in order to stop the moon's orbit. Also, once you've stopped it, it would probably fall towards the Earth, because it is not at the right altitude to stay in geostationary orbit. That would be extremely bad.
- usrusr 7y agoAre you suggesting that we reel in the moon to geosynchronous orbit? Ignoring our obviously insufficient mastery of the art of ropemaking etc, that's a quite entertaining thought experiment. Tidal forces while moving the moon closer would knead our whole geology into utter chaos once, then later tectonics could stabilise much more than possible with the moon in its current orbit. The weather would also be quite funny, with those daily, hours-long eclipses hitting the same regions over and over again, causing dramatic gradients in energy influx.
- tsbinz 7y agoWe are already doing that (or rather, the moon is doing it to us), more by changing earth's rotation than by changing distance. We just need to wait a couple billion years for earth to be tidally locked to the moon (and not just the other way around like it is now).
- djsumdog 7y agoYea I was hoping this was about some new developments on a space elevator cable, but with the base being out in sea or something. A space elevator would be amazing, but we don't have any materials strong enough yet to withstand the atmospheric sheer ... or a way to grab and pilot an asteroid anchor into orbit .. yet.
- thechao 7y agoIt’s a pity we don’t talk about ‘orbital ring systems’ more: many of the advantages of space elevators, but build-able with “off the shelf” superconductors, and steel & fiber optic cables. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_ring https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_ring
- module0000 7y agoKim Stanley Robinson, is that you??? Reading your comment(whether you intended it this way or not), made me want to read 'The Mars Trilogy' again. If I remember, grabbing and piloting an asteroid above Mars was how they setup their space elevator.
- djsumdog 7y agoThis is my absolute favourite sci-fi trilogy of all time. The part of the series where he describes the most complex navigation A.I. ever developed by humanity, on a ship that clamped onto an asteroid, setup a factory that mined it for fuel to redirect its course ... it was so incredibly well written, researched and believable. I read it while drunk on a bus and the next morning I just had to go back and read that entire chapter again. For those who haven't read it, it's a really good series.
- Udik 7y agoI thought it would mention "The distance of the Moon", the first (and one of my favourites) short story from Italo Calvino's "Cosmicomics". http://www.ruanyifeng.com/calvino/2007/07/ch_1_the_distance_of_the_moon.html http://www.ruanyifeng.com/calvino/2007/07/ch_1_the_distance_...
- SilasX 7y agoIf they meant that, they could have just said "literally". That would have clarified it.
- theoh 7y agoSomehow, titles like this are acceptable (I don't see anyone asking for it to be changed). At the same time, more informative titles that people find irritating (because they seem clickbaity) apparently do warrant editing. So we're supposedly in a fragile enough emotional equilibrium that we can't cope with clickbait titles, but obscure poetic titles are OK because... maybe because this is about elitism and intellectual snobbery, not about saving the user having to click to find out what the article is about?
- monkeydreams 7y agoI was also disappointed, but also a little concerned as to why MS would be publishing such an article.
- rvwaveren 7y agoHere's an overview of all submarine cables: https://www.submarinecablemap.com/ https://www.submarinecablemap.com/
- z3t4 7y ago160Tbps on 8 fiber pairs is impressive. I wonder when we will get residential Tbit fiber, it should not be that far long into the future. Just think of the applications. In comparison a display cable "only" carriage a few Gbit of data per second.
- tempguy9999 7y agoI honestly can't think of any applications. In the same way people bought new computers regularly until they got Fast Enough then sales really slowed, I think we've reached the same state for home-use comms. BTW Shakespeare's full works uncompressed are about 5.4MB
- noneeeed 7y agoI've often wondered about this. I get about 50mbps at home, and it's essentially more than enough for everything I do. Sure, having a faster connection speed would be great for big downloads, but I've never had any idea what I might do differently if I had gigabit fibre. Even something like 4k video streams fit in several tens of mbps, a family of 4 could all stream different 4k programmes with less than 200mbps between them. I'm not sure if I'm just suffering a lack of imagination, and don't realise what I'm missing out on. People who have really fast connections (gigabit): what do you do differently online that those of use with just "quite quick" connection don't?
- whatshisface 7y agoIf enough people had super-fast internet, downloads would get bigger. You could stream a desktop from a remote server for example. On a scale less threatening to software freedom, games could stream their art assets, allowing you to explore petabyte-sized worlds on consumer hardware. You could easily toss trained neural networks back and forth for whatever applications were dreamed up for them. However, you're not going to see this if 99% of people have 50mpbs. In that world, you'll only see things that use 50mpbs.
- 7y ago
- clopez 7y agoWhy it goes up to Bilbao instead of only to Galicia or Portugal? That will be shorter.
- lalos 7y agoWhy didn't they explain the need for peanut butter? Food supplies for the crew?
- theandrewbailey 7y agoThey did: > It’s therefore perhaps not a surprise that the laying of the Marea cable involved not only the latest in fiber optic cable and repeater stations, but also 11,000 meals. > This too required a variety of supplies – including 632 jars of peanut butter.
- ninju 7y agoOld article...please add (2017) to title >Today, September 22, 2017, ...
- simonebrunozzi 7y ago> ... establishes a faster and stronger telecommunications link not only to Europe, but to the next billion internet users that will come from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. I hate corporate PR so much for things like this. What's the point of talking about Asia? Data to/from Asia goes mostly trough the Pacific Ocean, not through Spain.
- jmknoll 7y agoIndia, Iran, and the Middle East are also parts of Asia, and it might feasibly be faster to transmit data through the Atlantic than the pacific to get to those places.
- gehsty 7y agoI think we'll some form of power link going from UK -> US during our lifetime, maybe via Iceland/Greenland so we can utilise the excess geothermal energy from Iceland.
- 3JPLW 7y agoWhat makes you think that's a possibility? Power transportation over long distances is lossy and thus very expensive.
- jawns 7y agoIt is lossy _now_ and very expensive _now_. I think what the poster was saying was such barriers may be surmountable in time.
- gehsty 7y agoI work in subsea power cables, AC transmission is not efficient, HVDC transmission is efficient for long distances. India has HVDC links 1500km long. I don’t understand the ‘lossy’ description, any energy transfer loses energy, when dealing with utilities it is either acceptable or not. HVDC is proven long distance transmission technology. There is a subsea hvdc link in the early planning stage between Iceland and the U.K. I think it is more likely the financing of the project is not arranged yet than the technology. The cost of these links is generally cheaper than a new build power station of a similar capacity, so when you can transfer excess generation it becomes cost effective to build.
- gehsty 7y agoAC Power transmission is not efficient over long distances without rectification. HVDC Power transmission already has links >1500km onshore. Offshore links are more expensive to build but I don’t think there are massive difference in losses (to the point where they are not worth building anyway). European countries are already connected by subsea HVDC links 500km long. There is a planned cable between Iceland and the U.K. the costs of construction are offset against currently wasted generation, so they can be built at a comparable cost to modern renewable energy, and then they open up an energy trading market that will add to the money made through generation.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]