h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

All the talk of doors in Askh2g2 has led me to write a few words about the design of another portal - that of the elevator or, as we call them in the UK, lifts.

The office lifts where I work are somewhat temperamental. This isn’t to say I don’t appreciate them - I do. They go up and down at an acceptable speed, and there are enough of them that I rarely have to wait long. In addition, the sides are made of glass, so I can gaze at the folks in the building across the street as I ascend or descend.

What irks me is the random amount of time it takes for the doors to open and close. Often there’s one ‘slow’ lift which, having reached its destination, sits there thinking for five seconds before it remembers it has to open the doors. For those inside the lift, this is just about the period of time it takes before your brain considers the notion that it’s broken, and you’re going to be trapped inside with Morag the HR director for a number of hours, while firemen frantically try to release you, and your colleagues amusedly watch you through the glass walls. Yet, it opens eventually, just leaving you with that unrequited fear.

The other lifts, on the other hand, have doors which open and close too fast. You really have to be on the ball to make it into an empty lift, as the doors don’t wait - they re-close immediately, before the lift zooms off to service another level. If folks are getting out of the lift, then you have a little time, but you may have to push past them a bit to ensure you get on board. All too often, you need to leg it across the lobby and throw yourself, Indiana Jones-like, into a closing lift, ending up in a crumpled heap before realising that it’s going in the wrong direction.

But solutions are at hand. As is common, the lift doors have sensors so they don’t close on anyone in their path. This is handy if you have a friend already in the lift you’re trying to enter. Spotting you, they can bravely thrust their hand through the rapidly closing gap to hold the doors open as you make your way across the lobby. Yet the problem still exists for that empty lift - how do you make it on board?

The answer is simple - slip-on shoes. You wait in the lobby for the tell-tale ‘ping’ as a lift arrives, then ease off a shoe and propel it towards the rapidly closing entrance. If you time it right, you’ll catch the sensor and throw the doors open again for a couple more seconds. In addition, the polished lobby floor means you can complete the journey by sliding gracefully in on your stockinged foot.

Well, that’s the theory. The practice is that either your shoe catches the company president on the shin, or alternatively, it disappears inside but the door closes before you can accompany it. This latter situation means hours of pressing buttons hoping to get that particular lift to open to see if your footwear is still inside, and if it is, whether it’s been adorned with a yellow sticky note bearing the word ‘Vandal!’ If it’s not inside, then the only option is to discard your other shoe. You don’t want to be publicly humiliated by responding to one of Morag’s ‘Cinderella’ posters.

People in London offices certainly lead interesting lives...

Elevators could be improved. Maybe if we enabled them with some artificial intelligence?...

I think you can see where this is going.


>>>>
Modern elevators are strange and complex entities. The ancient electric wench and "maximum-capacity-eight-persons" jobs bear as much relation to a Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Happy Vertical People Transporter as a packet of mixed nuts does to the entire west wing of the Sirian State Mental Hospital.

This is because the operate on the curious principle of "defocused temporal perception." In other words they have the capacity to see dimly into the immediate future, which enables the elevator to be on the right floor even before you knew you wanted it, thus eliminating all the tedious chatting, relaxing, and making friends that people were previously forced to do while waiting for elevators.

Not unnaturally, many elevators imbued with intelligence and precognition became terribly frustrated with the mindless business of going up and down, up and down, experimented briefly with the notion of going sideways, as a sort of existential protest, demanded participation in the decision-making process and finally took to squatting in basements sulking.

An impoverished hitch-hiker visiting any planets in the Sirius star system these days can pick up easy money working as a counsellor for neurotic elevators.
<<<< U42

I love elivators. people can't escape. The hospital ones are brillient, I've told so many people about nighthoover last year hidden elivators are the best though... the one that only starts one floor up, and goes to just one weird added on section, wthat isn't related in any geographical way to any other location in the hospital, and which had no cross communication in terms of letting one move between it and anywhere else in the hosptial, cept back down to the same random coridor, one floor up, that only has stairs to get you down I once got caught in a oddd stairwell at teh hospital, with my Father, and we had to escape through a firedoor.... and set off the alarm on the door in order to escape the stairwell with no exit some lifts are like that. almost as confusing as the lifts which have doors both sides, and you don't know which side is going to open on the next floor

I was trapped in an elevator with 15 other people and a dog for half an hour in a nursing home a few Christmases ago. We were singing Christmas carols. After the incident, we called ourselves the Singing Sardines.

Don't tell me - the elevator was rated to carry only 10 people?

I think it was rated for 12

I don't remember any limit for dogs.

Simple: If you have too many people and dogs, let the big people hold the dogs and little people.

I love that moment when the door opens, one more person gets in, then the lift politely announces in that terribly British voice:

"Lift overloaded".

I don't live in a country with polite elevators/lifts, so I can't visualize it .

So your elevators go "Get the hell out, you're too fat!" ??

We couldn't afford that model. We employ a lackey to do the shouting.

No, our elevators have prerecorded music that makes even muzak seem inspired by comparison.

'Unrequited fear' should be a pleasant thing, but I see that it's not.

As in unrealized fear? Worry about something that does not then come to pass? I sometimes think that worry is in my DNA, or else it rubbed off on me from my mother.

Whatever.

The elevators on the space towers in Arthur Clarke's 2001 trilogy must take a very long time to rise.

Days to weeks.

Only 23,000 miles to microgravity at geo-stationary altitude, almost twice that to the jumping off point for interplanetary travel at the one g artificial gravity terminus at the end of the counterbalance.

Game plans include space hotel and resort way stations to allow rest and recreation in transit rather than having to cover the entire distance in the equivalent of an airline seat.

I've always been fascinated by Clarke's sky hooks. I'm now concerned that they may no longer be feasible due to the massive number of satellites and orbital debris. Since sky hooks have to be located above the equator, this problem is exacerbated by the fact that every orbital path either lies along the equator or crosses it twice per orbit.


Recently I read Neil Stephenson's latest book, _Seveneves_. In it he introduces a new "spin" on the sky hook. He has these rotating tethers (the name escapes me at the moment). You fly up to the upper atmosphere, then get picked up by one end of this where the tip's rotational velocity is nullified with it's relative velocity to the Earth's surface. When that tip reaches apogee the passengers reach maximum relative velocity and get whipped into space.

The space elevator is explored in a SF book called "Limit"

http://www.amazon.com/Limit-Frank-Schatzing/dp/1623650445/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1474314317&sr=8-2&keywords=limit

I first saw the tether launch from the high atmosphere to orbit concept in a Dr. Robert Forward study.

The concept has a fuel/power economy advantage since it can pump itself to the desired altitude by means of alternately playing out or drawing in the the tether against the gravity well, same principle as pumping up a swing, running the whole system on a solar electric principle.

It gets even more exciting in context of lunar development, since the orbital tether landing and launch array passes within a few miles of any site on the moon at least twice a month, providing an easy means of moving material around on the moon or even launching from the moon to the Earth or other destination.

In either the terrestrial or the lunar case, kevlar is strong enough to do the job.

The diamond fiber or required for a full scale orbital bridge isn't necessary.

yeh... but, what colour will it be? We can't build one until we know what colour to make it... natch... *thinks*