Welcome to you stuff you should know from house Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and that makes this stuff you should miss. So did you hear Snap Dog's son got a football scholarship to I think you see? Yeah? So did uh P Diddes? No way? Yeah? And actually Sean Combs was the first to happen. It was about a month ago, and a lot of people got upset because they were like, we shouldn't you know, be paying for this millionaire multimillionaire son to go to college. But it was all explained. The sports guys came out and really defended and said, it's not you paying for it. It's athletic scholarships that are earned by athletes. And it's a well probably, but it was like, basically, it's not like some kid missing out on an education. Because Pete Eddy's son earned a football scholarship, he should be treated the same and so should Snoop Dogg sign. Where was there an outcry about Snoop Dogg sign? Uh? Not as much because he's the g you see. No one likes Puffy. I don't understand he seems like a nice enough guy. Uh, here's friends with Biggie Smalls. I was in his house once. I'd ever tell you that I had to. I was working on a music video with him and I had to deliver as a p a something to his home in Beverly Hills. And I went to the door and I rang the doorbell, and some really large guy in a warm up suit and like a Kane gold hat invited me in and took my thing and then escorted me out. So I was like in the little fourier and it was like lots of white marble, and I mean it looked it could have been like the King of France living there as far as I know. Yeah, there's like a fountain of sur rock. It was really like pretty plush. Of course, you know he's rich. But I took your thing. Is that lead? Are you talking about everything above the boards? Oh? Yeah it was. It was like a video cassettes for the shoot or something like that. I wouldn't be delivering anything illegal. Well, I didn't know if he did something illegal to you by taking your things, you put it. It was all on the up, could go and chuck anyway. I haven't been to Snoop's house yet, although I did seem one night in Atlanta, you did. Yeah, I can't tell that story. Though, let's hear part time, doesn't he I'm used to, I believe. I'm not sure what a weird start for the show. Yeah, it is a little weird, especially since we're talking about space elevators. Has nothing to do with it. This is not like we're talking about like p Funk or George Clinton andthing like that, or even Bill Clinton. Although I bet George Clinton could build a space elevator in his mind. You know he has many times chuck. Um, Well, I've got I've got something. I have an actual Yeah, it seems kind of stupid, now let's hear it. Uh well, okay, um five fifty seven am. On July one, thousand eleven, About a year ago, something big ended, something that really helped with our childhood, like really was an icon of our childhood. I'm not even gonna let you guess. The Space Shuttle. Of course, the program ended. It started in one and it went all the way to two thousand eleven, thirty great years. Yeah, um and uh more missions um and actually there's this awesome thing on gizmoto. It's you can watch all of the space Shuttle launches at once. It's just like a hundred and thirty five little tiles on the screen, and it's like, you know, starting from countdown to lift off and like it's got everything. Well, they probably don't have the one ill fated attempt. There were two accidents, one of yeah, it's there, I think I found it, and it just goes dark at about the time the Challenger UM exploded. Yeah. Um, but it was the was a huge deal for our childhood. But it's also you know, a huge deal for the space program because when they launched the first shuttle I think it was Columbia. Um, it was the first time that anyone had ever shot a spacecraft into space and then brought it back intact usable. Is huge. Yeah, we're not talking like a capsule where like Larry Hagman comes down and splashes into the sea and then gets out, because those capsules weren't reused. This was like, we have an appropriately named space shuttle there and back basically exactly. It even looked like a plane. So it was a big deal when this happened and it proved like okay, we can go to space and back using the same equipment. It brought costs down tremendously. Sure, they're still pretty high. Um. And then the space Shuttle program ends and everybody's like, how are we going to get to space and back? Now, Obama, did you think it's through? And uh, Obama didn't say it, but I'll bet he was thinking it when he was kind of skulking away after being shouted at for basically closing NASA. Not true. Um, he probably thought, have you ever heard of the space elevator? Dummy? You should say that. Yeah. Uh, that's what we're gonna talk about. Josh, and I thought this was a thrilling article. You thought the article itself was thrilling. No, no, no, the concept of the space elevator, well it is. Yeah, the article self was a little It was a little two thousand five. It's at outdated, but it's pretty cool. Um. So you mentioned the Space Shuttle. Even though the Space Shuttle took place over the span of what do you say, thirty years? Yeah, anyone to two thousand eleven, the price of getting the thing going didn't change a whole lot, which was pretty remarkable. Yeah, it stayed about ten thousan dollars per pound, right, And they originally predicted when they were working on the Shuttle program before it started, that it was gonna be about fifty million a mission. Yeah. It came to about five million a mission. In every mission. They spent half a billion dollars on the shuttle the Shuttle mission. Um, and uh, that ten dollars per pound of that is fuel? Yeah? Is that the per pound of everything on there? Yeah? I think it's just like that kind of equation. So a lighter astronaut would be cheaper, don't don't really symbolic, I think, yeah, I know. I think it's more like like if you if you take the full weight of this this, yeah, and divided by the money spent. Yes, I get it. So in theory, a lighter astronaut would make it cheaper, but not really not really okay, um, because I think they had those astronauts like way down to the Graham exactly what they wanted in a way, like they would probably be like, you need to excrete because you're about to suit up, go excrete. You need to p six ounces right now. I'd be a great astronaut then because I can be on command. Can you really almost always Okay, so I've got something for you about six ounces. Um there. Have you seen the little diagram him of a solo cup? You know the lines on a solo cup. Yes, their measurements the bottom one are they really is an ounce? The top one so like liquor. Yeah, the the middle one five ounces for wine. And then I'm not kidding the the the lowest top band report that's that's twelve ounces for beer. I never knew that that's ingenious, it is. I love little tidbits like that, Like the amount of matches in a matchbook is equal to the amount of cigarettes in a pack. I didn't know that that makes sense. We should just talk about those things all day instead of space elevators. No, let's talk about space elevator. All right, let's talk about it, um quickly, a space elevator and we'll get into the specifics here. But what it basically is, it's a ribbon, a carbon nano tube composite ribbon anchored to a platform offshore, yeah, way out in the Pacific Ocean. And it's has a counterweight way up in space six And they basically would that would be the elevator shaft, and they would send stuff crawling up and down this ribbon? Uh two outer space? Yes, have you ever seen somebody like a piano mover lift the piano? Sure, a second story apartment that except in space. Yeah, that's pretty much it. I don't like the comparison to the game of tether ball here. I thought it was a terrible, terrible analogy, So let's just skip it because it didn't make much sense to me. Yeah, I think you. I think you said it like, basically, we're connecting a line between a platform in the ocean and the satellite up in space, and we're putting something on it that can go up and down. Yeah, and the whole thing of we should just stop right there. The cool thing about this is to me is that every single part of this is feasible right now to do, except for the one thing that they need to do it, which are the carbon nanotubes that go sixty two thousand miles into space. Yes, they're around right, but we can't make them that long yet. Right. There's um that's I think I think that's that's a really good point, Like we all of this is just waiting. And I saw a little video that Michio Kaku or cucku Um made about this explaining it, and he was saying, like everything's been surmounted now, like now it's all in the realm of physical possibility. There's just a few more breakthroughs and it's all carbon nanotubes, which are we've talked about graphine before, right, strongest substance known demand or humankind. That Um, it's one atom thick layer of carbon, incredibly strong. It's like a hundred times stronger than steel at about one fifth of the weight. And a carbon nanotube is a layer of graphine rolled into a tube like it looks like chicken wire, exactly like a soccer ball. Chicken wire. Yeah, it's like like if you spread out a length of chicken wire and then roll it up, Nana, it's yeah. And we say soccer ball because the shape of the traditional soccer ball, not these crazy ones are using these days. I don't even recognize it as a soccer ball. Yeah, but the old school soccer ball, that shape is the same, the same shape as as these carbon atoms, which is the key to it its strength. Um. I've been at I've seen it described as um stiff but flexible like a steel guitar string. So it moves, but it's still super super strong and um, even though it's just a few atoms across, they are ten million times as long as they are wide. Once you get this thing going, so like a guitar string. Yeah, well, because these are nanotubes, so like they're diameters like a few billions of a meter, I think one. Is that right? Yeah, because nano is a billion a billion, yes, yeah, but so so it's very thin, very thin. Um. That's the point. And ultimately I saw that the sixty two a mile cable would be it could be as thin as a piece of seran wrap. Yeah, it would still be strong enough to not snatch under its own weight sixty miles. Like, there's no quality of material outside of this that wouldn't just snap like a hair, like pulling one of your hairs in in half. Agree, this one will. But the problem is is you don't make carbon nanotubes. You grow them. Yeah. There's a really cool nova video too on YouTube where it shows a guy in the lab pulling a uh braided forest of carbon nanotubes and he starts pulling it and you see it all like coalescing together, and he gets like ten ft away and then it finally snaps and then it just it's like smaller than a human hair. It just like floats away almost. Okay, so that's that's longer then I've I've seen the record that I saw was four centimeters in length. Yeah, well this was uh, I don't think I think it was stretching. I don't think it was the original. Okay, So they they the carbon nanotubes grow and then after like, that's the world record four centimeters, which is like a one point six inches, right, that's short, and then it just stopped one of the right exactly. One of the problems with them not being able to figure out why it stops growing is that scientists don't know why it grows in the first place, Like they have no idea. They're just like, oh, this happens when you when you do this, um. And they figured out that there are some things like hydrogen gas in certain amounts makes it grow longer. Um, if you do a little too much hydrogen gas, it won't grow at all. So that there's they're they're figuring this out, but they still are really at a point where they're not they don't understand carbon nanotubes at all. They were only officially discovered in which is a blip in the scientific community. But we're making headway. And like you said, once the carbon nanotu technology is able to be made into things that are maybe several meters long, or they can figure out how to basically wrap it smaller pieces together in like you know, how you insulate wires with plastic something like that, without the the alloy coming away. Then we'll be able to make this space ribbon ribbon for the elevator space ribbon, which essentially is going to be like a there. They would braid these things together like a rope, correct, yes, which would still be tiny though. Yeah, so it'll either be like you know, several meters in length branded together or really short ones braided together. But either way they're not just gonna make one continuous sixty two there's sixty two mile strand yeah. The one thing I didn't get though, if it's so small, like it needs to be a certain size to have these lifters attach to it, you know, like it can't be a human hair, right like that, what what could you attach to that? They have to gain traction with it? So yeah, there, there, It couldn't It couldn't just be as thin as plastic wrap, even though strengthwise it could be. So that's one of the things they're working on, is bulking it up. I guess so, because you have to put the lifter on it. Like you're saying, so the lifts are all from now on, everything like this all exists. We can make this today, you and I can make it right now. Well, let's get it into space first. What what the idea is that they would spool the sing up. Once they've created it, they would shoot it into space with some kind of spacecraft. Uh. Once it's in space, they would start lowering it back to the Earth um towards the platform out in the middle of the sea. While it's still going out into space, right, they'd start lowering the ribbons. Yeah, so it's continue, it's still going in. It's going in two opposite directions. It would be like some kid walking the dog. Yeah. Uh. And eventually it it's lowered and there's a dude standing on a platform saying all right, back it down. Then he would take it and clip it onto a c platform, although it would be much more complicated than I think about that operations. So this platform is going to be like four miles from any shipping or air lanes, which is important in the Equatorial Pacific, and a sixty two thousand mile long strand of rope. Even they could say it's it's thick as like a cable, one of the cables holding the Golden gate Bridge. Imagine catching that. I mean it's obviously not, but still like there's somebody piloting machine that like, and you I don't know how you would move the counterweight around the spool so that how are you going to get the threat? This is the most difficult aspect of the whole program, if you ask me, I think grabbing that that ribbon and connecting it. Although they act like they've got that all figured out. They're like, we had this nanotube that was this long. We're all set to trust. Like they've got a guy out on a platform just sitting around waiting waiting for this thing to come down from space. So they so that guy catches the ribbon, ties it off probably with a pretty decent sailors not um, and then you attach the lifter to it. Right, that's right, Um. The lifter is a robotic thing. It basically it's it's sort of like a train track it uses these traction shread rollers. Uh, and it would clamp onto this ribbon and through something a little more advanced than a gasoline engine. I think, what are they using a free electron laser to create the energy to do this? Basically, what they're doing is they're gonna put solar panels but made of stuff that really absorbs light from a laser right on the bottom or on the top, probably on both sides, and then they're just gonna shoot lasers up and down the ribbon and then that laser just powers It's basically like directing sunlight onto full of photovoltaic cells and then converting that to electricity. Then it's just plain old mechanical energy. It's like a little motor that would crawl at a hundred and eighteen miles an hour. Mind you, it's not exactly a crawl that it would shoot up this ribbon into space to the final destination, which would be anything. I think that first they talked about capturing an asteroid to serve as as the which is just as the counterweight to um what I think is smart which would potentially be a satellite or the spacecraft that brought it out there to begin with Yeah, just unfolding or reconfiguring or whatever, and of a sudden bam, there's your counterweight. There's the other end of the string, right dude, that's it. I mean, after they get this going, they're saying it can basically be a constant operational elevator to the sky, lifting as much as thirteen tons of payload at a time in some cases humans maybe eventually, Yeah, crazy. I guess the whole point now would be to just shuttle stuff to say this. The International Space Station UM supplies that kind of thing, gruel food UM, or if you had some sort of asteroid mining operation, you could take your daily hall to the space elevator to be brought down. The point is this thing could be used for trips to UM lower Earth orbit every day, several times a day, because I think lower Earth orbit is UM between five and fift hundred miles, so that's like UM four to twelve hours trip basically, and they're talking about going further than that, right, But Lower Earth orbit is where like all of the all that's where all the action is generally UM. The problem is is that's also where all the space to bree is. Yeah, and I think I don't think we mentioned what the best part about all this is is that it would cost about the closest system I've seen is about two hundred dollars a pound to deliver stuff to outer space, and what was the Space shuttle costs dollars a pound. So that's why they're pursuing this is because it's much much more affordable. They likened it to the Transcontinental Railroad back in the day, linking space to Earth. Yeah, okay, so the problems Josh avoiding um junk flying around in space Like it would suck if you got this thing all looked up and some asteroid came flying out of nowhere and snapped the thing and half well, not just asteroids, apparently space debris UM largely refers to junk man made jump and lower Earth's orbit is allows you with it. Um. One, there was a satellite, an old out of use satellite, collided with a new in use satellite recently and blew it up, and all of a sudden, two pieces became four thousand pieces. And that's nothing, that's a drop in the bucket. It is so um. The problem is is like even a small like one centimeter diameter piece is a threat to the space elevator. Um so right now, nora D tracks things as small as ten centimeters. Did you know that? I didn't once I read this, but I was pretty I was pretty shocked. But they're gonna have to start tracking stuff down to one centimeter. So this is another kind of challenge that I don't think people talk about, is tracking space debris. Or they're also proposing that we just go up there and get rid of it, like pay contractors to go to space and bring these things down and clean up exactly. That'd be a unique approach, right, Um it's called active avoidance, and UM, it's pretty amazing that you could actually, potentially, because this thing is tethered to a c platform, move the c plat form to dodge these things. But that would mean that there's like some guy whose job it is to like, yeah, joystick it. Yeah, that's crazy. It sounds very far fetched, but it's supposedly not super far fetched. I mean, this company Liftport, they're they're one of the private firms that are have been I think they partnered with NASA for a while until NASA, you know, they're funding has dried up to a large degree, so they had to scrap things like partnering with Liftport, but um Liftport as of now, I think I read in two thousand eleven they have sort of scrapped or not scrapped, but they put on the back burner the space to Earth version and they're working on a lunar version. Oh yeah, so they want to put one of these on the Moon. Um, which can be done right now if they had the money. That makes sense to me. Um not as much gravity, so they don't need the carbonano tubes. Yeah, they could use the stuff called zylon. It's a synthetic polymer. And apparently they could like do this within the decade. Like everything's in place, it's just a matter of doing it. So yeah, I thought about having one that goes from the Earth to the Moon, or one that goes from the Earth to Mars or you know, and you just well and then from the Moon tomorrow. You know, you could connect them like station one is here, then you have another one that goes there. And the ideas are going to build a bunch of these, right, that's the idea, because if one goes down because of some space to breathe, hey, no problem, We've got another one that we've built even cheaper over here in this part of the ocean. So that's the idea. What's awesome is this is I mean, this is far reaching, it sounds futuristic, it's actually pretty smart. Simple idea like where it's gonna build an elevator that goes to space, and it's actually kind of an old idea. There was a Russian UH scientists named Constantine Ciokowski who proposed this in heard about that and then um kind of went. I think everybody thought he was a crack pot for a while. They thought da Vinci was too, though yeah, actually did they No, not da Vinci. They think he was a genius back then too, probably except for his flying machine. I think that's credibility. Um. But then Arthur Arthur C. Clark comes along and writes about this in UH Fountains of Paradise, and he was he very clearly saw like the big problem was the ribbon. If you could figure out the ribbon, everything else would be fine, which is still the problem. Arthur C. Clark way ahead of his time. So that's pretty much it. I mean, if they get this lunar and we're going there, they're talking about deep space exploration from a lunar based system, which you know, the benefit there is is it cost a lot of money to get from here to the moon. If you could shuttle a the components of a rocket up to the moon and just get it going up there and be a lot cheaper, right. We talked about that with asteroid minding that that was another their idea is you could launch things from these asteroids or whatever because the a vast majority remember the weight of the space shuttles in the fuel, almost all of that is just used within the first like ten miles. Then after that you start to escape births or a bit and exactly. So um, yeah, if you could, if you could get rid of all that, like you just dropped the cost tremendously base I know. I mean, I'm curious to see within a decade if we're gonna have a space elevator from the Moon to something else, we will be riding one. So yeah, well, it all depends on funding. That's like, these ideas are all great in practice unless you have billions of dollars to get it. But think about Jeff Bezos has billions of dollars um ms Kirt Cameron, that's think James Cameron Elon Musk. These guys have cash and this is what they're putting their money into, this kind of thing. So I don't think it's gonna come down NASA funding. I think it's gonna come down to the will of guys like Kirk Cameron. Well, Kirk Cameron does not have billions of dollars, but he does have a fine collection of faith based movies. Yeah, directive video anna that you can check out, but not the dirty kind of directive video. No, no, no, no, I guess it's about it, right, it's pretty much I'm looking forward to it. Yeah, private space exploration is definitely the way of the future. We should put in a request for this article to be updated, but I'm a free to think they'll be like, have at it. Yeah, I'm afraid to do that. Dude. Well, if you want to read a hilariously out of date article on how Stuff Works that still captures what's going on with the space elevator um and with some cool artists rendering of stuff, you can type in space elevator that's at the handy search bar and a great little website called how stuff Works dot com. And I said search bar, which means it's time now for a listener mail Josh, I'm gonna call this dead Sea follow up UM, and I should mention. We got a lot of emails from Dead Sea visitors and tourists and a lot of photos and one thing we did not cover because I haven't been there and experience this, but we said, swim in the Dead sea a lot. You ain't a lot of swimming going on in the Dead Sea. There's there's a lot of floating and flailing because they just say it's really disorienting because you're so used to the way you move in water and all of a sudden that's totally different. So people are like gasping, and eventually they'll learn to trust and relax and float on their back. You don't want to go on your stomach. You don't want to try and swim UM, and you don't want to get it in your face because it will really sting your eyes and it tastes really bad. And we had this one that wrote in his husband was suffering. They advise you not to go on with cuts or open sores. Obviously her husband was suffering from a little UM. It's called many different things. When you walk a lot and you get chafed between the legs. Yeah, it goes by many different crude names. But he had a bad case of this and uh didn't tell his family that he was traveling with his wife knew and he went in the Dead Sea promptly got out and the family was like, where did you know the sum in law go? And she was like, maybe he's just not into it all right. So this is from Daniel, but thanks to everyone else. He wrote in just finished the dead Sea podcast had a couple of interesting tidbits. You briefly mentioned the Great Salt Lake when talking about the high salinity the Dead Sea. Uh. These two lakes actually have quite a bit in common. Both lakes are located in the desert region, although the elevation is drastically different. Like the Dead Sea, the Great Salt Lake here in Utah has a very high salt content about, making it hard for anything but hello philic bacteria and some Brian shrimp to grow. Uh. This guy's a graduate student. By the way, b y U. Both lakes are fed mainly by a smaller freshwater lake roughly fifty miles away, the Dead Sea being fed by the uh Sea of Galilee to the north by way of the Jordan River. The Great Salt Lake is fed by Utah Lake to the south, also by the Jordan River coincidence, I'm not sure. In both cases, the water leaves the lake only through evaporation. Uh. And like the Dead Sea, there are many areas the Great Salt Lake that are quite stinky at times, mainly in the muddy waters with a level is low. The Great Salt Lake is also dense enough for you to float with little to no effort. So if you're not able to ever make it over to Europe to visit the Dead Sea, I would say the Middle East, wouldn't you. Okay, you can head on over for a float. And it's little American cousin out here in Utah. Keep up good work, guys. I really enjoy the wide variety of topics that it's from. Daniel. He was a grad student at b YU studying microbiology. So good for you, my friend, nice much smarter than I you. Yeah, well, yeah, great students. All I have to say English undergrad microbiology grad as a well rounded human beings agreed. Um? Oh wait, you're the English undergrad. I love to put the two of you together. You're a well grounded human exactly. UM, if you have some ideas of how to put me in chuck together to form another superhuman UM, we want to hear him. Also, if you just want to say hi, or you have something cool or interesting to tell us a great fact WE love those I love them that you'd like us a tweet or put on Facebook. You can send those two via Twitter s y Escape podcast via Facebook at Facebook dot com. Slash stuff you Should Know, and you can send us a an email ilec trynmail um too. Stuff podcast at Discovery dot com. For more on us and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff Works dot com. MHM

Welcome to you stuff you should know from house Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and that makes this stuff you should miss. So did you hear Snap Dog's son got a football scholarship to I think you see? Yeah? So did uh P Diddes? No way? Yeah? And actually Sean Combs was the first to happen. It was about a month ago, and a lot of people got upset because they were like, we shouldn't you know, be paying for this millionaire multimillionaire son to go to college. But it was all explained. The sports guys came out and really defended and said, it's not you paying for it. It's athletic scholarships that are earned by athletes. And it's a well probably, but it was like, basically, it's not like some kid missing out on an education. Because Pete Eddy's son earned a football scholarship, he should be treated the same and so should Snoop Dogg sign. Where was there an outcry about Snoop Dogg sign? Uh? Not as much because he's the g you see. No one likes Puffy. I don't understand he seems like a nice enough guy. Uh, here's friends with Biggie Smalls. I was in his house once. I'd ever tell you that I had to. I was working on a music video with him and I had to deliver as a p a something to his home in Beverly Hills. And I went to the door and I rang the doorbell, and some really large guy in a warm up suit and like a Kane gold hat invited me in and took my thing and then escorted me out. So I was like in the little fourier and it was like lots of white marble, and I mean it looked it could have been like the King of France living there as far as I know. Yeah, there's like a fountain of sur rock. It was really like pretty plush. Of course, you know he's rich. But I took your thing. Is that lead? Are you talking about everything above the boards? Oh? Yeah it was. It was like a video cassettes for the shoot or something like that. I wouldn't be delivering anything illegal. Well, I didn't know if he did something illegal to you by taking your things, you put it. It was all on the up, could go and chuck anyway. I haven't been to Snoop's house yet, although I did seem one night in Atlanta, you did. Yeah, I can't tell that story. Though, let's hear part time, doesn't he I'm used to, I believe. I'm not sure what a weird start for the show. Yeah, it is a little weird, especially since we're talking about space elevators. Has nothing to do with it. This is not like we're talking about like p Funk or George Clinton andthing like that, or even Bill Clinton. Although I bet George Clinton could build a space elevator in his mind. You know he has many times chuck. Um, Well, I've got I've got something. I have an actual Yeah, it seems kind of stupid, now let's hear it. Uh well, okay, um five fifty seven am. On July one, thousand eleven, About a year ago, something big ended, something that really helped with our childhood, like really was an icon of our childhood. I'm not even gonna let you guess. The Space Shuttle. Of course, the program ended. It started in one and it went all the way to two thousand eleven, thirty great years. Yeah, um and uh more missions um and actually there's this awesome thing on gizmoto. It's you can watch all of the space Shuttle launches at once. It's just like a hundred and thirty five little tiles on the screen, and it's like, you know, starting from countdown to lift off and like it's got everything. Well, they probably don't have the one ill fated attempt. There were two accidents, one of yeah, it's there, I think I found it, and it just goes dark at about the time the Challenger UM exploded. Yeah. Um, but it was the was a huge deal for our childhood. But it's also you know, a huge deal for the space program because when they launched the first shuttle I think it was Columbia. Um, it was the first time that anyone had ever shot a spacecraft into space and then brought it back intact usable. Is huge. Yeah, we're not talking like a capsule where like Larry Hagman comes down and splashes into the sea and then gets out, because those capsules weren't reused. This was like, we have an appropriately named space shuttle there and back basically exactly. It even looked like a plane. So it was a big deal when this happened and it proved like okay, we can go to space and back using the same equipment. It brought costs down tremendously. Sure, they're still pretty high. Um. And then the space Shuttle program ends and everybody's like, how are we going to get to space and back? Now, Obama, did you think it's through? And uh, Obama didn't say it, but I'll bet he was thinking it when he was kind of skulking away after being shouted at for basically closing NASA. Not true. Um, he probably thought, have you ever heard of the space elevator? Dummy? You should say that. Yeah. Uh, that's what we're gonna talk about. Josh, and I thought this was a thrilling article. You thought the article itself was thrilling. No, no, no, the concept of the space elevator, well it is. Yeah, the article self was a little It was a little two thousand five. It's at outdated, but it's pretty cool. Um. So you mentioned the Space Shuttle. Even though the Space Shuttle took place over the span of what do you say, thirty years? Yeah, anyone to two thousand eleven, the price of getting the thing going didn't change a whole lot, which was pretty remarkable. Yeah, it stayed about ten thousan dollars per pound, right, And they originally predicted when they were working on the Shuttle program before it started, that it was gonna be about fifty million a mission. Yeah. It came to about five million a mission. In every mission. They spent half a billion dollars on the shuttle the Shuttle mission. Um, and uh, that ten dollars per pound of that is fuel? Yeah? Is that the per pound of everything on there? Yeah? I think it's just like that kind of equation. So a lighter astronaut would be cheaper, don't don't really symbolic, I think, yeah, I know. I think it's more like like if you if you take the full weight of this this, yeah, and divided by the money spent. Yes, I get it. So in theory, a lighter astronaut would make it cheaper, but not really not really okay, um, because I think they had those astronauts like way down to the Graham exactly what they wanted in a way, like they would probably be like, you need to excrete because you're about to suit up, go excrete. You need to p six ounces right now. I'd be a great astronaut then because I can be on command. Can you really almost always Okay, so I've got something for you about six ounces. Um there. Have you seen the little diagram him of a solo cup? You know the lines on a solo cup. Yes, their measurements the bottom one are they really is an ounce? The top one so like liquor. Yeah, the the middle one five ounces for wine. And then I'm not kidding the the the lowest top band report that's that's twelve ounces for beer. I never knew that that's ingenious, it is. I love little tidbits like that, Like the amount of matches in a matchbook is equal to the amount of cigarettes in a pack. I didn't know that that makes sense. We should just talk about those things all day instead of space elevators. No, let's talk about space elevator. All right, let's talk about it, um quickly, a space elevator and we'll get into the specifics here. But what it basically is, it's a ribbon, a carbon nano tube composite ribbon anchored to a platform offshore, yeah, way out in the Pacific Ocean. And it's has a counterweight way up in space six And they basically would that would be the elevator shaft, and they would send stuff crawling up and down this ribbon? Uh two outer space? Yes, have you ever seen somebody like a piano mover lift the piano? Sure, a second story apartment that except in space. Yeah, that's pretty much it. I don't like the comparison to the game of tether ball here. I thought it was a terrible, terrible analogy, So let's just skip it because it didn't make much sense to me. Yeah, I think you. I think you said it like, basically, we're connecting a line between a platform in the ocean and the satellite up in space, and we're putting something on it that can go up and down. Yeah, and the whole thing of we should just stop right there. The cool thing about this is to me is that every single part of this is feasible right now to do, except for the one thing that they need to do it, which are the carbon nanotubes that go sixty two thousand miles into space. Yes, they're around right, but we can't make them that long yet. Right. There's um that's I think I think that's that's a really good point, Like we all of this is just waiting. And I saw a little video that Michio Kaku or cucku Um made about this explaining it, and he was saying, like everything's been surmounted now, like now it's all in the realm of physical possibility. There's just a few more breakthroughs and it's all carbon nanotubes, which are we've talked about graphine before, right, strongest substance known demand or humankind. That Um, it's one atom thick layer of carbon, incredibly strong. It's like a hundred times stronger than steel at about one fifth of the weight. And a carbon nanotube is a layer of graphine rolled into a tube like it looks like chicken wire, exactly like a soccer ball. Chicken wire. Yeah, it's like like if you spread out a length of chicken wire and then roll it up, Nana, it's yeah. And we say soccer ball because the shape of the traditional soccer ball, not these crazy ones are using these days. I don't even recognize it as a soccer ball. Yeah, but the old school soccer ball, that shape is the same, the same shape as as these carbon atoms, which is the key to it its strength. Um. I've been at I've seen it described as um stiff but flexible like a steel guitar string. So it moves, but it's still super super strong and um, even though it's just a few atoms across, they are ten million times as long as they are wide. Once you get this thing going, so like a guitar string. Yeah, well, because these are nanotubes, so like they're diameters like a few billions of a meter, I think one. Is that right? Yeah, because nano is a billion a billion, yes, yeah, but so so it's very thin, very thin. Um. That's the point. And ultimately I saw that the sixty two a mile cable would be it could be as thin as a piece of seran wrap. Yeah, it would still be strong enough to not snatch under its own weight sixty miles. Like, there's no quality of material outside of this that wouldn't just snap like a hair, like pulling one of your hairs in in half. Agree, this one will. But the problem is is you don't make carbon nanotubes. You grow them. Yeah. There's a really cool nova video too on YouTube where it shows a guy in the lab pulling a uh braided forest of carbon nanotubes and he starts pulling it and you see it all like coalescing together, and he gets like ten ft away and then it finally snaps and then it just it's like smaller than a human hair. It just like floats away almost. Okay, so that's that's longer then I've I've seen the record that I saw was four centimeters in length. Yeah, well this was uh, I don't think I think it was stretching. I don't think it was the original. Okay, So they they the carbon nanotubes grow and then after like, that's the world record four centimeters, which is like a one point six inches, right, that's short, and then it just stopped one of the right exactly. One of the problems with them not being able to figure out why it stops growing is that scientists don't know why it grows in the first place, Like they have no idea. They're just like, oh, this happens when you when you do this, um. And they figured out that there are some things like hydrogen gas in certain amounts makes it grow longer. Um, if you do a little too much hydrogen gas, it won't grow at all. So that there's they're they're figuring this out, but they still are really at a point where they're not they don't understand carbon nanotubes at all. They were only officially discovered in which is a blip in the scientific community. But we're making headway. And like you said, once the carbon nanotu technology is able to be made into things that are maybe several meters long, or they can figure out how to basically wrap it smaller pieces together in like you know, how you insulate wires with plastic something like that, without the the alloy coming away. Then we'll be able to make this space ribbon ribbon for the elevator space ribbon, which essentially is going to be like a there. They would braid these things together like a rope, correct, yes, which would still be tiny though. Yeah, so it'll either be like you know, several meters in length branded together or really short ones braided together. But either way they're not just gonna make one continuous sixty two there's sixty two mile strand yeah. The one thing I didn't get though, if it's so small, like it needs to be a certain size to have these lifters attach to it, you know, like it can't be a human hair, right like that, what what could you attach to that? They have to gain traction with it? So yeah, there, there, It couldn't It couldn't just be as thin as plastic wrap, even though strengthwise it could be. So that's one of the things they're working on, is bulking it up. I guess so, because you have to put the lifter on it. Like you're saying, so the lifts are all from now on, everything like this all exists. We can make this today, you and I can make it right now. Well, let's get it into space first. What what the idea is that they would spool the sing up. Once they've created it, they would shoot it into space with some kind of spacecraft. Uh. Once it's in space, they would start lowering it back to the Earth um towards the platform out in the middle of the sea. While it's still going out into space, right, they'd start lowering the ribbons. Yeah, so it's continue, it's still going in. It's going in two opposite directions. It would be like some kid walking the dog. Yeah. Uh. And eventually it it's lowered and there's a dude standing on a platform saying all right, back it down. Then he would take it and clip it onto a c platform, although it would be much more complicated than I think about that operations. So this platform is going to be like four miles from any shipping or air lanes, which is important in the Equatorial Pacific, and a sixty two thousand mile long strand of rope. Even they could say it's it's thick as like a cable, one of the cables holding the Golden gate Bridge. Imagine catching that. I mean it's obviously not, but still like there's somebody piloting machine that like, and you I don't know how you would move the counterweight around the spool so that how are you going to get the threat? This is the most difficult aspect of the whole program, if you ask me, I think grabbing that that ribbon and connecting it. Although they act like they've got that all figured out. They're like, we had this nanotube that was this long. We're all set to trust. Like they've got a guy out on a platform just sitting around waiting waiting for this thing to come down from space. So they so that guy catches the ribbon, ties it off probably with a pretty decent sailors not um, and then you attach the lifter to it. Right, that's right, Um. The lifter is a robotic thing. It basically it's it's sort of like a train track it uses these traction shread rollers. Uh, and it would clamp onto this ribbon and through something a little more advanced than a gasoline engine. I think, what are they using a free electron laser to create the energy to do this? Basically, what they're doing is they're gonna put solar panels but made of stuff that really absorbs light from a laser right on the bottom or on the top, probably on both sides, and then they're just gonna shoot lasers up and down the ribbon and then that laser just powers It's basically like directing sunlight onto full of photovoltaic cells and then converting that to electricity. Then it's just plain old mechanical energy. It's like a little motor that would crawl at a hundred and eighteen miles an hour. Mind you, it's not exactly a crawl that it would shoot up this ribbon into space to the final destination, which would be anything. I think that first they talked about capturing an asteroid to serve as as the which is just as the counterweight to um what I think is smart which would potentially be a satellite or the spacecraft that brought it out there to begin with Yeah, just unfolding or reconfiguring or whatever, and of a sudden bam, there's your counterweight. There's the other end of the string, right dude, that's it. I mean, after they get this going, they're saying it can basically be a constant operational elevator to the sky, lifting as much as thirteen tons of payload at a time in some cases humans maybe eventually, Yeah, crazy. I guess the whole point now would be to just shuttle stuff to say this. The International Space Station UM supplies that kind of thing, gruel food UM, or if you had some sort of asteroid mining operation, you could take your daily hall to the space elevator to be brought down. The point is this thing could be used for trips to UM lower Earth orbit every day, several times a day, because I think lower Earth orbit is UM between five and fift hundred miles, so that's like UM four to twelve hours trip basically, and they're talking about going further than that, right, But Lower Earth orbit is where like all of the all that's where all the action is generally UM. The problem is is that's also where all the space to bree is. Yeah, and I think I don't think we mentioned what the best part about all this is is that it would cost about the closest system I've seen is about two hundred dollars a pound to deliver stuff to outer space, and what was the Space shuttle costs dollars a pound. So that's why they're pursuing this is because it's much much more affordable. They likened it to the Transcontinental Railroad back in the day, linking space to Earth. Yeah, okay, so the problems Josh avoiding um junk flying around in space Like it would suck if you got this thing all looked up and some asteroid came flying out of nowhere and snapped the thing and half well, not just asteroids, apparently space debris UM largely refers to junk man made jump and lower Earth's orbit is allows you with it. Um. One, there was a satellite, an old out of use satellite, collided with a new in use satellite recently and blew it up, and all of a sudden, two pieces became four thousand pieces. And that's nothing, that's a drop in the bucket. It is so um. The problem is is like even a small like one centimeter diameter piece is a threat to the space elevator. Um so right now, nora D tracks things as small as ten centimeters. Did you know that? I didn't once I read this, but I was pretty I was pretty shocked. But they're gonna have to start tracking stuff down to one centimeter. So this is another kind of challenge that I don't think people talk about, is tracking space debris. Or they're also proposing that we just go up there and get rid of it, like pay contractors to go to space and bring these things down and clean up exactly. That'd be a unique approach, right, Um it's called active avoidance, and UM, it's pretty amazing that you could actually, potentially, because this thing is tethered to a c platform, move the c plat form to dodge these things. But that would mean that there's like some guy whose job it is to like, yeah, joystick it. Yeah, that's crazy. It sounds very far fetched, but it's supposedly not super far fetched. I mean, this company Liftport, they're they're one of the private firms that are have been I think they partnered with NASA for a while until NASA, you know, they're funding has dried up to a large degree, so they had to scrap things like partnering with Liftport, but um Liftport as of now, I think I read in two thousand eleven they have sort of scrapped or not scrapped, but they put on the back burner the space to Earth version and they're working on a lunar version. Oh yeah, so they want to put one of these on the Moon. Um, which can be done right now if they had the money. That makes sense to me. Um not as much gravity, so they don't need the carbonano tubes. Yeah, they could use the stuff called zylon. It's a synthetic polymer. And apparently they could like do this within the decade. Like everything's in place, it's just a matter of doing it. So yeah, I thought about having one that goes from the Earth to the Moon, or one that goes from the Earth to Mars or you know, and you just well and then from the Moon tomorrow. You know, you could connect them like station one is here, then you have another one that goes there. And the ideas are going to build a bunch of these, right, that's the idea, because if one goes down because of some space to breathe, hey, no problem, We've got another one that we've built even cheaper over here in this part of the ocean. So that's the idea. What's awesome is this is I mean, this is far reaching, it sounds futuristic, it's actually pretty smart. Simple idea like where it's gonna build an elevator that goes to space, and it's actually kind of an old idea. There was a Russian UH scientists named Constantine Ciokowski who proposed this in heard about that and then um kind of went. I think everybody thought he was a crack pot for a while. They thought da Vinci was too, though yeah, actually did they No, not da Vinci. They think he was a genius back then too, probably except for his flying machine. I think that's credibility. Um. But then Arthur Arthur C. Clark comes along and writes about this in UH Fountains of Paradise, and he was he very clearly saw like the big problem was the ribbon. If you could figure out the ribbon, everything else would be fine, which is still the problem. Arthur C. Clark way ahead of his time. So that's pretty much it. I mean, if they get this lunar and we're going there, they're talking about deep space exploration from a lunar based system, which you know, the benefit there is is it cost a lot of money to get from here to the moon. If you could shuttle a the components of a rocket up to the moon and just get it going up there and be a lot cheaper, right. We talked about that with asteroid minding that that was another their idea is you could launch things from these asteroids or whatever because the a vast majority remember the weight of the space shuttles in the fuel, almost all of that is just used within the first like ten miles. Then after that you start to escape births or a bit and exactly. So um, yeah, if you could, if you could get rid of all that, like you just dropped the cost tremendously base I know. I mean, I'm curious to see within a decade if we're gonna have a space elevator from the Moon to something else, we will be riding one. So yeah, well, it all depends on funding. That's like, these ideas are all great in practice unless you have billions of dollars to get it. But think about Jeff Bezos has billions of dollars um ms Kirt Cameron, that's think James Cameron Elon Musk. These guys have cash and this is what they're putting their money into, this kind of thing. So I don't think it's gonna come down NASA funding. I think it's gonna come down to the will of guys like Kirk Cameron. Well, Kirk Cameron does not have billions of dollars, but he does have a fine collection of faith based movies. Yeah, directive video anna that you can check out, but not the dirty kind of directive video. No, no, no, no, I guess it's about it, right, it's pretty much I'm looking forward to it. Yeah, private space exploration is definitely the way of the future. We should put in a request for this article to be updated, but I'm a free to think they'll be like, have at it. Yeah, I'm afraid to do that. Dude. Well, if you want to read a hilariously out of date article on how Stuff Works that still captures what's going on with the space elevator um and with some cool artists rendering of stuff, you can type in space elevator that's at the handy search bar and a great little website called how stuff Works dot com. And I said search bar, which means it's time now for a listener mail Josh, I'm gonna call this dead Sea follow up UM, and I should mention. We got a lot of emails from Dead Sea visitors and tourists and a lot of photos and one thing we did not cover because I haven't been there and experience this, but we said, swim in the Dead sea a lot. You ain't a lot of swimming going on in the Dead Sea. There's there's a lot of floating and flailing because they just say it's really disorienting because you're so used to the way you move in water and all of a sudden that's totally different. So people are like gasping, and eventually they'll learn to trust and relax and float on their back. You don't want to go on your stomach. You don't want to try and swim UM, and you don't want to get it in your face because it will really sting your eyes and it tastes really bad. And we had this one that wrote in his husband was suffering. They advise you not to go on with cuts or open sores. Obviously her husband was suffering from a little UM. It's called many different things. When you walk a lot and you get chafed between the legs. Yeah, it goes by many different crude names. But he had a bad case of this and uh didn't tell his family that he was traveling with his wife knew and he went in the Dead Sea promptly got out and the family was like, where did you know the sum in law go? And she was like, maybe he's just not into it all right. So this is from Daniel, but thanks to everyone else. He wrote in just finished the dead Sea podcast had a couple of interesting tidbits. You briefly mentioned the Great Salt Lake when talking about the high salinity the Dead Sea. Uh. These two lakes actually have quite a bit in common. Both lakes are located in the desert region, although the elevation is drastically different. Like the Dead Sea, the Great Salt Lake here in Utah has a very high salt content about, making it hard for anything but hello philic bacteria and some Brian shrimp to grow. Uh. This guy's a graduate student. By the way, b y U. Both lakes are fed mainly by a smaller freshwater lake roughly fifty miles away, the Dead Sea being fed by the uh Sea of Galilee to the north by way of the Jordan River. The Great Salt Lake is fed by Utah Lake to the south, also by the Jordan River coincidence, I'm not sure. In both cases, the water leaves the lake only through evaporation. Uh. And like the Dead Sea, there are many areas the Great Salt Lake that are quite stinky at times, mainly in the muddy waters with a level is low. The Great Salt Lake is also dense enough for you to float with little to no effort. So if you're not able to ever make it over to Europe to visit the Dead Sea, I would say the Middle East, wouldn't you. Okay, you can head on over for a float. And it's little American cousin out here in Utah. Keep up good work, guys. I really enjoy the wide variety of topics that it's from. Daniel. He was a grad student at b YU studying microbiology. So good for you, my friend, nice much smarter than I you. Yeah, well, yeah, great students. All I have to say English undergrad microbiology grad as a well rounded human beings agreed. Um? Oh wait, you're the English undergrad. I love to put the two of you together. You're a well grounded human exactly. UM, if you have some ideas of how to put me in chuck together to form another superhuman UM, we want to hear him. Also, if you just want to say hi, or you have something cool or interesting to tell us a great fact WE love those I love them that you'd like us a tweet or put on Facebook. You can send those two via Twitter s y Escape podcast via Facebook at Facebook dot com. Slash stuff you Should Know, and you can send us a an email ilec trynmail um too. Stuff podcast at Discovery dot com. For more on us and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff Works dot com. MHM