I think copyright won't apply after the first half hour.

Enforcement might get interesting since jurisdiction will be a question. The RIAA and MPAA will probably be the first two organizations to have extra-planetary legal claims.

I'd pick Max Richter. His Sleep¹, which is nearly 8.5 hours, would be a good start.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_(album)

I'm sure James Last's heirs will be happy to supply the required stock.

The entire R Kelly "Trapped in the Closet" on repeat could be a strong contender.

Stairway to Heaven is about 8 minutes long, so they better work hard on speeding the elevator up to match that.

At more than 13g I'm not sure that, "a new day will dawn for those who stand long, and the forests will echo with laughter"... after experiencing that.

3.4x10^7/(500)^2 = a m/sec2

For an 8min20sec flip time. 20+g if you really want the 8min.

Only if they want this to be a fancy burial service where we slingshot your corpse into space for kicks.

Another version of the Euthanasia Coaster? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthanasia_Coaster

I don't doubt there's a market for that service.

An expensive way to die still...

Yes, but it's a completely different market from folks desiring a space elevator.

Also, it makes the need for muzak nonexistant because all your passengers are dead and can't hear it anyway. Seems to me that defeats the purpose of trying to time the trip to coincide with the length of a particular song.

Also completely pointless - playing David Bowie to a space suit in a convertible that's fired into interplanetary space.

It seems to me that you missed the joke…

Nope.

It just wasn't really that good.

Shepard Tone -- the whole trip

You'd need to accelerate at 68 G's[0] (foreward for the first four minutes, backward for the last four). Not neccesarily unsurvivable, but your passengers (and most cargo) are likely to be unpleasantly pastelike.

We should probably treat it more like commercial air travel than compressive-structure elevator rides.

0: 200kph*8day/8min/2min => 67.981081 gravity

TIL forwards acceleration is called "eyeballs in" and backwards is called "eyeballs out".

It looks like 6 Gs is about as much as is feasible for an extended period of time.

Brief search didn't get me anything about longest ride on a centrifuge, which I guess would be the only way to test G-tolerance over extended periods. Where 'extended periods' means > an hour.

Any pointers to 6 Gs as being tolerable, for how long? Tnx.

Don't know, I was quoting a figure for 10 minutes. 6 gs for 10 minutes will get you to 35 km/s, which I believe exceeds any rocket launches so far.

I don't think 68 Gs is survivable at all. At least not for more than a fraction of a second. 46 Gs for a few seconds is the most a human has survived that we know of.

10 Gs for 1 minute is lethal.

> unpleasantly pastelike.

I don't think you'd get actual paste, but yes, 8-minute space elevator rides aren't looking very physically possible.

There’s only so much bossa nova one can endure.

What is kph? I can't be 200 km per hour and have it take 8 days.

For a space elevator, the "space station" is near geosynchronous orbit. 36000 km / 200 km/h is roughly 8 days.

In SI, that would be kilo pico hour. But yeah I'm pretty sure it's kilometers per hour in American.

I assume the author meant km/h or 200 km per hour as you have guessed, and if the satellite it 36000km high / 200km it would take 180 hours or 7.5 days.

8 * 24 * 200 = 38,400 km.

Geostationary orbit is 35,786km above the equator, so 8 days feels a fair approximation.

Music? The first four days will be safety announcements. The last four will be debates as to who is responsable for cleaning up all the vomit. A week of near-zero-g in a room with 30 people will not be fun.

"near-zero-g"

Why would it be "zero-g" you're not in orbit?

You are moving from ground (1g) to geostationary orbit at zero. It will be a slow progression from one to the other (with a very slight lateral acceleration) but imho once below .5g anyone who is going to get air/sea/space sick wont see much difference.

Ah good point - I was just thinking about lower down.

Is humor against HN rules? I regularly see such posts being downvoted and it doesn't make sense to me.

Most humor can be categorized as "insubstantive comments" and those are discouraged.

It is possible to crack a joke here and get it upvoted, but it's hard to pull it off. I even once had a joke upvoted by quite a lot,* like 50 points or something, but most jokes are downvoted not because humor is forbidden, but because insubstantive comments are discouraged.

Some humor is downvoted for being uncivil because a lot of humor is basically poking fun at people or mocking them. A lot of humor is not nice at all. HN tries to meet a very high bar for civility.

* Under my old handle and it hit 59 points:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14996229

I posted a joke a couple of days ago about "the Xzibit pattern" which ended up at 10 points, but it fluctuated a lot so it probably got something like 40 up 30 down. Would be interesting to see the breakdown of votes on HN.

I'm just glad you can't see the # of votes here for other comments. Helps prevent bandwagonning, though that still happens for downvotes once the css kicks in.

Well said. That's about as succinct a sum-up as I've heard. This might actually belong in the FAQ as it might save some folks a bit of confusing cultural acclimation upon arriving at HN from parts distant such as reddit or slashdot (is that still a thing?).

At any rate, way better than "harumph! HN hates fun!"

But if you note my "joke" actually illustrated a point of physics about which at least one person was confused: the expected g-forces. So it wasnt insubstantive, certainly not as insubstantive as the parent comment about elevator music.

Can I ask why you retired your previous handle?

The short version is that I made the leaderboard and it looks like a feminist handle. There's more factors involved, but that's the crux of it.

No, it’s not against the rules, but downvotes aren’t there to enforce the rules.

It’s just a culture thing. HN tends to be more news and factually focused than reddit/Twitter/etc. People here just prefer to stay on topic, especially since humor is very different between people and can be very hit or miss.

yup, coming here and the top comment actually being something insightful or some point worthy of discussion instead of some sarcastic comment or joke like elsewhere is what makes this place.

The use if my joke is evident in the immediate reply, the confusion over g forces. There is no reason an informative comment cannot also be funny.

Weird to me that they aren't accelerating till the midpoint and then breaking till the destination at a constant 1g. Gets around the space sickness by providing artificial gravity and should take ~hours rather than ~days.

That trip would only take an hour, but I don't think you could build a cable and drive system capable of operating at 18 km/s.

Just for a bit of fun perspective, that’s 7 km/s faster than reentry velocity! Even if you felt like dealing with the heat, it would cost an ungodly amount of energy which kind of defeats the point of an elevator. On the other hand, you could ignore radiation shielding if the trip is short enough? Not worth the trade off I think.

Wouldn’t you hit that velocity far above the troposphere, where there’s much less air resistance?

Not sure if this would work, but how about using a wire with evenly-spaced metal beads, then using a magnet (a large one like used in MRI machines) to pull up the cart? You'll probably have to turn the magnet on/off at a specific frequency, depending on the momentum of the cart, which could be a challenge.

power = force * distance / time

If you want constant acceleration, you need to maintain constant force. A higher-velocity vehicle applies that force across a greater distance per unit time, and therefore requires more power.

Accelerating 1 metric ton at 1g requires 9800 N. So at peak velocity (18 km/s), that's 180 megawatts per ton, which is more than 700 times the power to mass ratio of a Tesla P100D.

Surely friction is an issue at much faster speeds? I guess the fastest trains go 400+ KPH, with the fastest being maglev. I assume, though can't tell from the article, that the space elevator has physical contact with the cable, and I can't think of how one could reproduce maglev tech when going vertically.

So, there's surely a safe speed limit built into the materials being used? It's probably faster than the speed they're starting out with, but I kinda assume it can't be fast enough to shorten the trip to hours from days.

As an aside, moving people is probably not the most profitable use of the thing for the foreseeable future, as cool as that sounds. Getting a satellite into orbit for a tenth the cost is revolutionary (though they mention the cost compared to the shuttle, which is much more expensive than rocket transport...so they may be cherry-picking numbers to make this seem more revolutionary than it is).

Anyway, I can't think of how they could accelerate much beyond the fastest non-maglev train speeds without tearing apart the cable and car, but I may be underestimating the strength of carbon nanotubes, and whatever other component materials they're using. Perhaps there's a materials nerd here who knows.

Because it would require you to reach an improbably high velocity (especially for pulling yourself up a cable)--and you'd do so relatively quickly using an improbably large amount of energy in the process.

you're already experiencing a constant 1g right now :-)