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Comment by harry-wood | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one who was disappointed that this wasn't an article about a plan to actually raise a ladder to the moon?

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Yea 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.

It’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

Kim 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.

This 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.

I 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_...

https://what-if.xkcd.com/157/

This was a fun read!

> At worst, your hands and the surface of the pole will both be converted into exciting new forms of matter.

I love the book of What If?

Also this situation occurs in similar form but smaller scale in RAMA I.

Somehow, 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?

I'm also agonizing in disappointment.

While this would indeed have been amusing, given the moon's orbit of the earth, how would this be possible?

A rope ladder hanging from the moon. (Not quite "raising", and ignoring a bunch of other details.)

I 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.

You 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.

Are 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.

We 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).

Well I guess that makes the construction deadline a little easier to hit :P

> a couple billion years

What good does an eclipse if the Sun is all around? Or rather, we can commemorate that we'll have half a day long solar eclipses all year long.

Something like "The Cradle" from Niel Stephenson's Seven Eves maybe. (It basically just dangles several hundred feet above the ground)

I was also disappointed, but also a little concerned as to why MS would be publishing such an article.

If they meant that, they could have just said "literally". That would have clarified it.

No, there are at least two of us!

make that three

And my axe!

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