Having been away from Seattle for a time, I’ve been trying hard to get into the vibe again. It’s good to know that the Seattle Weekly rag is still around, as is The Seattle Times. But new since I left the Emerald City are the two magazines that are dedicated to everything Seattle, well, Washington I guess, since the Seattle Met just spent half an issue covering Mt. Rainier.
I was casually thumbing through the latest edition on the bus the other day. Well, thumbing threw is a bit analog in my world of digitation. Seattle Met also comes in an electronic form, and that’s what I have subscribed to.
If you haven’t tried electronic magazines, I highly recommend them, by the way. You can click on links right in the story itself. Say you just love a new brewery or a resort out in the hinterlands somewhere that is “the” place to be right now. Click on a link, make a reservation and pop back to the story, all without lifting a finger or a receiver.
But back to Seattle Met. I wasn’t too far into the articles when I happened upon the one about the space elevator. If you don’t know much about it, it really operates like an elevator. You jump on it on earth or the moon and you go up into space. It’s a big platform on a spindly high-tech wire that takes you up and down, spacecraft optional.
I had heard this idea somewhere before, and for once, I it wasn’t my idea. I searched my bus riding brain for the source of that information. I didn’t have to look far. For in the article was the guy who had told me about it long ago, Michael Laine. Back in the days when I lived in Bremerton, Michael was something of a visionary. Some said he was a crackpot and dreamer, but I just think he is an idea guy. He ran Teknology Laine back then, one of the many Dot Bomb start-ups that eventually folded into the depths of big ideas gone bad.
It was then that Michael fell in love with the idea of a space elevator. He must have been extremely convinced of its viability because he got NASA to hand him a cool $570,000 in seed month. Soon the money was all gone and the dream of taking an elevator into space by 2017 vanished right along with it.
It’s been said that the whole space elevator thing is very feasible. They even have an annual Space Elevator Conference to talk about the whole thing. In fact, Michael now believes he can build one of these things on the moon for a fraction of the cost and hopes to land another $500,000 of your hard earned money to finance further research.
Now, this isn’t about Michael really. I kind of liked the guy. We need more dreamers in this world, more idea guys – lord knows I’m one of them.
Rather, it’s about the whole space elevator riding experience. Every day I commute to a big skyscraper in Seattle. I work on the 26th floor. That means a daily elevator ride up and down, sometimes, such as when I need a Top Pot maple bar fix, it’s multiple jaunts in the elevator.
Every morning I push the button. Then I wait. And sometimes wait longer. If I’m lucky, an elevator door opens up. I get on it, and if I’m even luckier, I arrive on the 26th floor. It can be a slow go on that elevator.
Yesterday, I imagined this elevator being the one that would take me to space. I’m not dialed in to the exact mathematics of such a ride, but I wouldn’t exactly be looking forward to the ride up it. I think it would be a really, really long trip. It seems to take forever to get up to the 26th floor. I can’t imagine how long it would take to reach space, which is something like the 32,808th floor.
Wow, that’s one long elevator ride. As we all know, no one speaks on an elevator. You simply look straight towards the door, watching the floors click by. You might look at your watch or text to mix things up a bit, but there’s not exactly a lot to do on an elevator.
I guess that’s a good thing, too. Can you imagine someone chatting away on the phone for 32,000 + floors? Somewhere around the 500th, you’d want to push them out the door.
I’m not really sure there are doors on the space elevator or if it’s just a big platform. I hope for the $10 billion they think it will cost that they can get doors. If not, at the very least I would think a railing would be necessary. But you know these government projects. They can quickly spin out of control. No, not the elevator itself, but the costs, and before you know it, such luxuries as a railing around the whole thing may just be trimmed in a cost cutting measure.
I do hope that if it does come to cost cutting measures that they cut the Muzak first. My building has Muzak, a Seattle invention, by the way. It makes my 26-floor trip very painful. I think 32,000 more of Muzak would cause you to go postal, or spaceal in this case.
And that brings me to an obvious question. Once the elevator reaches the top, what’s there? Lady’s lingerie? Home furnishings? You must step off into something other than deep space.
I guess that’s a great opportunity for our capitalist society. First, you can line the entire trip with space age, Jetson-like rocket-propelled billboards. And when you reach the top, there’s a McDonalds or a Macys waiting for you.
I personally hope it’s Macys. Knowing my fear of heights, I know I’ll be needing some new underwear.
In the Emerald City, having my ups and downs,
– Robb