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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • Thats the coolest part, ie the old thing about a chain only being as strong as its weakest link, and a chain of sufficient length couldn’t even hold a feather due to its own weight.

    The CNT’s (if near perfectly atomically aligned) and give them an INSANE tensile strength, some numbers I just googled puts steel at about 620 MPa (0.62 GPa) whereas the CNT’s that have been made are pushing 80 GPa.

    Obviously something this big is already gonna be a multi-governmental collaboration, but all you need then is to find the easiest reasonable sized meteor to DART our way, and catch that bitch on the way by.

    For the atmosphere part, it would have to be an entirely geostationary orbit, and so really you would have the same winds as expected on skyscrapers (plus a bit). All this the tensile strength has more than enough wiggle room for.

    Material costs aren’t too bad too considering its nearly a hydrocarbon, and the strength only requires a fairly thin cable - in equivalent terms imagine the material for a road as long, we’ve got millions of km’s of them, 100 is easy



  • As a nano engineer, youre 100% right - with the added slowdowns of safety research. Many of these particles are entirely different beasts on a nanoscale, an example commonly used is microscopic copper is just copper, nanoscopic will have you dead within the hour if inhaled (dont quote my timeframe on that one).

    That being said many cool materials are still coming out, just aren’t yet at that commercialized availability level yet.

    For example graphene has the potential to replace copper -at least in high performance applications- cause its got some fucked levels of conductivity

    Edit for some more examples cause I’m a nerd about this stuff:

    Carbon nanotubes make vantablack, the material that can absorb 99.9% of visible light (not that exciting beyond a party trick commercially, but in areas trying to minimize electromagnetic noise this is revolutionary).

    Silver nanoparticles have been shown to have passive disinfectant properties, leading to the possibility of a cloth that you could run dirty water through and make it drinkable.

    And my favorite being we’ve already created the carbon based structures (can’t recall if it was nanotubes specifically) with theoretically high enough tensile strength that if made a couple kilometers long could be used to lasso an asteroid and create a space elavator