Google X, Google’s secretive R&D laboratory, has confirmed that it was indeed working on a space elevator — but sadly had to put the project on the back burner until humanity creates a building material that’s strong enough. The same team at Google X has also investigated teleportation and hoverboards — but again, at least for now, the secret sauce that would unlock the development of these technologies has eluded the Google geniuses.
These rather remarkable revelations come from a story published by Fast Company, which was given exclusive access to the Google X facility in Mountain View, California. The story mostly focuses on how Google X identifies problems that can be solved with technology, and then the multi-stage process of (hopefully) bringing a solution to market. While Google X could be working on dozens or hundreds of problems/solutions at any one time, Glass is the facility’s only real product that is getting close to consumer adoption. Other prominent projects include Google’s driverless car, smart contact lenses, and Loon — but, like teleportation, hoverboards, and space elevators, there’s no real timeline to bring any of these to market.
It’s always going to be tricky to bring things to market when you’re standing on the bleeding edge of technology, though. It’s not actually all that hard to come up with a problem that could be solved with technology — such as cheap space travel — but whether we actually have the materials, tooling, and scientific knowhow to create the solution is another matter entirely. That’s exactly what happened when the Google X Rapid Evaluation team looked at the possibility of building a space elevator. According to Dan Piponi, one of the team’s researchers, such a space elevator would require a building material ”at least a hundred times stronger than the strongest steel that we have” — and the only material that comes close to that is carbon nanotubes.
The top half of a space elevator, in low Earth orbit (artist concept, obviously)
As you may know, we’re actually getting quite good at building long strands of carbon nanotubes, but we still haven’t managed to make a high-quality nanotube rope that’s more than a meter long. To get to low Earth orbit (LEO), we’re going to need nanotube strands that are hundreds of miles long. There’s no reason to believe that we won’t eventually devise a method of producing long chains of nanotubes cheaply, but we’re probably talking about five or 10 years at least. Recently, an in-depth report into the feasibility of space elevators found that we should have the capability to build a LEO space elevator by 2025.
Google X ran up against similar problems when it was investigating the feasibility of teleportation and hoverboards. Piponi found that teleportation “violates several laws of physics” (but the research did lead onto some research into encrypted communications). They got a bit further with the hoverboard idea, managing to build some small-scale prototypes — but as we’ve covered in the past, scaling that up to a self-balancing board that has the power to levitate a human is currently well beyond the bleeding edge of materials science.
HUVr hoverboard, in classic Back to the Future pink
Still, even if these stalwarts of sci-fi remain out of our reach for a few more years, it’s pretty darn cool that Google is working on them. For now, let’s just not think about the repercussions of Google owning the world’s only space elevator or being the first to commercialize teleportation…
No comments:
Post a Comment