From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Wed Aug 28 2002 - 01:20:18 MDT
On Tue, Aug 27, 2002 at 10:07:05PM -0700, spike66 wrote:
>
> Regarding the diamond tower, it occurred to me today
> that we need not use exotic materials if we have enormous
> quantities of the ordinary stuff. We could create a 30 km
> high pile of rock and dirt out in the Sahara Desert, where
> no one should get too worried about our wrecking something.
What about the crust? A 30 km pile of sand, with a density of around
2000 kg/m^3 would exert a pressure of around 600 MP. That is to my
knowledge more than the limit for plastic deformation of rock (and why
we don't have any cool Olympus Mons style mountains on Earth). So the
sandcastle would sink into the crustal rock (ironic, isn't it). The crust
is just 40 km deep under most of Sahara, while it is over 70 kilometers
deep beneath Himalaya and 60 beneath the central Andes - just like
icebergs it takes a lot of crust to raise a puny mountain like Mt.
Everest.
My guess is that you would need to decrease the density a lot to make
it work. A lot of aerogel in rock containers, or simply a huge
concrete-air structure might work.
> No exotic materials required for any
> part of this plan. It is so low tech, I almost lose interest.
Maybe we can power it with self-replicating robots building solar power,
or use small black holes to accelerate the sand? :-)
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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