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.