Sky Line

The idea of a Space Elevator is fascinating. In this documentary they keep talking about Fountains of Space though I first heard about it in the forgotten sequal to 2001, called 3001. Same author though. And I think the Fountain book was older so that point may be irrelevant.

But that is kind of the thing. The documentary is supposed to be about the space elevator but as none has been built yet the filmmakers are stuck with documenting the efforts in building it. But since biilding it is stuck in the stage of material science the film itself gets stuck in an endless loop of "we basically need unobtainium, we think it's carbon nanotubes, but we can't as yet build even half a meter of the stuff". That's about all we got out of it. The rest is filled out with long stretches of irrelevancy, some schisms in an early company doing engineering on the subject, some kids saying it would be neat to build it etc etc.

I understand that it's hard to find new data to present since we are locked in by material scince before we can progress. But as it is, it feels like the relevant content of this 70 min documentary could have easily been summed up in a 7 min youtube video.

What of the concept of a space elevator? The idea has long been thought to be some kind of a fantastic theory.

But then leave it up to one of the great science fiction authors of all times, Arthur C. Clarke, to visualize just such a thing. Clarke talked about this in 1964, right about the time that he and director Stanley Kubrick began collaborating on what they would hope to the "the proverbial good science fiction film" (which, when it was released in 1968 in the form of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, turned out to be much more); but it was in 1979 that he put the theory into his novel "The Fountains Of Paradise"

In the 75-minute 2015 documentary SKY LINE, we witness groups of scientists wanting to put this long-held idea of building what is essentially a stairway to heaven, or more precisely an orbiting satellite or spaceport. If the idea seems exceptionally far-fetched, not to mention a far off project that will cost a gigantic amount of money, when thought about much more carefully, it actually seems to make sense. As the participants in this documentary, including Bradley Edwards, Tom Nugent, Michael Laine, and Jerome Pearson point out, rockets that have sent men, equipment, and satellites up into orbit since Sputnik in 1957 have been prone to failure (with catastrophic results, as in the 1986 Challenger tragedy), and the exhaust from thousands of rocket launches may be contributing, however small it might seem in retrospect, to the changes in our atmosphere that are causing global warming. But it is highly unlikely, unless this documentary is viewed, that anyone would know about all these scientists and entrepreneurs engaging in the race to build such a thing.

Will such a space elevator get rid of exhaust-spewing rockets entirely? Probably not; and by the admissions of everyone profiled here in SKY LINE, the actual reality of a space elevator is at least twenty years off, if not more so. I for one don't necessarily see it happening in my own lifetime, though I wouldn't discount it out of hand. But the possibility of a space elevator existing in the future is another way of stimulating not only the appreciation of the vast universe our planet occupies, but also an appreciation of how we can save our species from our own abuse of the environment before it's too late. Those can only be considered good things.