I have just found a screen shot of the Awstats traffic information for my old securitronlinux.com domain and I was getting more traffic to my website at the height of my websites popularity but with my current website the amount of unique visitors is higher, I am getting over 7500 unique visitors with my current level of traffic and 10,000 visits to my website this month, with my old website domain I was getting 6888 unique visitors to my website and 50,000 visits to my website in one month. I think that this is a good thing, even if I am getting less traffic at this time, I am getting my message out there to a wider audience. This can only be a good thing, the point of starting a website is getting a wide audience. And I think I have achieved that now. Having many unique visitors means a lot of different people are coming to the website. There are plans to begin construction of a space elevator that will be completed by 2050. A space elevator is a 36,000 Kilometre long cable that reaches from the geostationary orbit to the surface of the Earth. The space elevator would need to be 10 meters thick if constructed from carbon nanotubes as planned. It is not guaranteed that this deadline could be met, the current rate of manufacture of carbon nanotubes is too slow.
The Arthur C Clarke novel Fountains of Paradise dealt with the idea of a space elevator, but the book Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson had a more realistic portrayal of the construction of a space elevator on Mars. The space elevator was constructed from the top down from an asteroid by automated machines, that built the cable which gradually lowered down to the surface of Mars and it was captured and locked into a socket. It has been said that a cable on Earth would need to be 96,000 Kilometres long, maybe if you had a suitably massive counterweight like a captured asteroid, then you could get away with a 36,000 Kilometre long cable. There is more information about the construction of a space elevator here: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator. It might be necessary to build a cable 96,000 Kilometres long if there is no possibility of a large enough counterweight placed at the other end. But the cable needs to be strong enough obviously to support the weight of the length of the cable below a given point as well as the weight of a climber on the cable as well. A large enough counterweight will enable the cable to be stretched taut and supported properly.
They have shown a space elevator in the Star Trek Voyager episode Rise, this was not the same type of space elevator that is planned for construction on Earth. There is an interesting story on Slashdot now, that mentions a technology invented by Google that basically is a pair of glasses with a screen in them that can overlay computer information on your field of view. This is rather like the cyborg styled Gargoyles in the awesome novel Snow Crash. Truly a very good futuristic novel, I wonder if the Homeland of America will really break up into a set of micro franchises instead of having large corporations running the nation as we see at the moment. The Homeland is slipping down the drain at the moment as Australia is with uncontrollable boat people arrivals and no real border patrols around our island nation. Every company is going overseas to India or China. China can manufacture everything for a much cheaper price than any company in Australia and this is the future of manufacturing for America as well as Australia. Even Mexico can not compete with China. We have not built anything really awe inspiring in Australia for a long time, yet in China they have the Three Gorges Dam and those huge ghost cities they have constructed that as yet are empty.
It has been said that the Three Gorges Dam has slowed the rotation of the Earth by 0.6 of a second, but this would countered by the effect of earthquakes that could speed up the rotation of the planet by a tiny amount. The effect is negligible, the effect on the planet of a terrorist blowing up the dam and releasing the unimaginable amount of water all at once would have a greater effect on the planet. The amount of water backed up behind the dam is enormous and it weighs a truly staggerings amount. If it was suddenly released all at once with a terrorist attack on the dam then some very bad things would happen. It could create an earthquake and obviously that amount of water rushing down the river smashing everything in its path would devastate everything in the path of destruction. And there is a giant dam under construction in the Amazon that will be a very large project as well. Humans are having a large impact on the planet with these immense projects that are changing the face of the planet itself. I had a strange dream once where I was a bridge builder and I had constructed a massive bridge over the ocean from Sydney to San Francisco over the pacific ocean, this bridge was like a giant dam.
I can not imagine a gargantuan dam across the ocean stretching across the Pacific ocean, but that is what I built in this dream. If you could build this, it would not last long due to the movement of the continental plates and earthquakes, that is the same reason you could build a tunnel under the ocean floor from New York to London, the crust that far under the sea floral is too hot and there are too many undersea volcanoes that you would have to deal with. It would most likely take 500 years or more to drill a tunnel 5280 Kilometres under the ocean floor even if you had two tunnel boring machines drilling towards each other that never stopped for repairs or replacement of parts. Of course that is just like my dam across the Pacific ocean, just a pipe dream, but it is alright to dream. A space elevator is a more realistic dream. It would make space travel a little cheaper and you could lift parts for a spaceship into orbit with the climbers on the cable instead of using polluting rockets. I wonder what effect the Moon would have on the space elevator as the Moons gravity pulls on the counterweight on every orbit around the Earth. I guess that the designers would take this into account, the effect might be negligible I assume, the space elevator would be engineered to take this into consideration.
We need to build something enormous in Australia, but it seems that we can not afford it now, the Snowy Hydroelectric Scheme was a huge engineering project, but it is at risk of being sold off like every other Australian company is now. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYYdh84pFng&feature=youtube_gdata_player. There is a nice mention of the space elevator technology at this link. The most likely countries to build a space elevator are Japan or China. The space elevator either would be put on the ocean attached to a oil rig platform, or in South America. A platform constructed on the ocean would be just as good as one built on land. This type of technology is necessary if humanity wants to expand into space. Sure, some people say we should stay on Earth and fix the problems on our own planet instead of living in space, but a base on the moon or on Mars would enable many useful scientific discoveries to be made. It would take a very long time for us to terraform Mars to be more like Earth, but it is little more livable than the Moon. The atmosphere on the planet Mars is equal in pressure to the Earth`s atmosphere at 100,000 feet in altitude and is mostly carbon dioxide.
Any water on the planet Mars would be frozen under the surface of the planet in permafrost much like Siberia. They have dug out a frozen woolly mammoth as a single 23 tonne block of permafrost. Once they did this a long time ago and they cooked the meat and ate it and it was perfectly preserved. This is the reason for the idea that you could put the DNA of a woolly mammoth into an Elephant and eventually breed a woolly mammoth in modern times. They would be placed in a park in the Siberian wastelands and then we could view these ancient creatures as they were back then. How awesome would that be? Surely this is a better idea than resurrecting the dinosaurs and having a zoo with Velociraptors running around and a large paddock with Tyrannosaurus Rex clones running around. Some things should just be left alone. The Tasmanian Tiger should be brought back, but there would need to be a DNA sample to sequence for that to happen and we might not have any sadly. If a woolly mammoth can be preserved in the permafrost of the Siberian wastelands then could there be lifeforms preserved on Mars? You could write a good book about that for sure. Maybe the planet harboured lifeforms at one point in time and it was wiped out?
Climate change due to an asteroid strike could have annihilated the Martian life and there could be traces of life concealed in the permafrost that a manned mission could discover when they drilled for core samples. That is a very necessary part of a manned mission to Mars as well as a future mission back to the Moon. Hopefully they can send back watchable quality television footage this time, but we have better technology now and a future Chinese or Indian space mission would be able to record 1080p video of the landing and the first steps on the Moon. When the first Moon landing took place, someone would have had to get out of the lander, set up the camera then I assume, get back into the lander and then the first steps were recorded. Maybe they were behind the camera when they transmitted the most famous footage in history. It does not matter if the first man on the Moon was actually the second, the footage is what matters. We need to go back to the Moon, but with the current world financial situation this might not happen. The private enterprise sector might be able to pull something like this off eventually. I hope to see this happen in my lifetime and I am sure many other fans of space want to see this as well.