OT: About Space Elevators

[dogscoff]

MAybe they yould even use this power that comes down the cable, it just has to be strong enough. Thus you would not need to "ground" it, you channel the current into your battery.

Well, if memory serves me correctly, according to Dr Emmet Brown ot the Back to the Future series, a lightening strike supplies exactly 1.21 jiggerwatts of electricity, which happens to be the exact amount needed to send a sports car into the past. So you could actually go up the cable in Australia at 9 in the morning and come down in Europe at midday in 1955.

Seriously, I should think the cable would actually do away with lightning in the area altogether... As I understand it, lightning is when static electricity builds up at cloud level to such an extent that it has to find the route of least resistance to the ground.
With a permanent link between the ground and all levels of the atmosphere, (and I'm not sure but I think bucky carbon would be a pretty good conductor) surely the static would be constantly conducting itself to ground and so there would never be enough built up to form an arc (lightening). Ummm...

You can tell I haven't studied science in 10 years!