Week 9: Space and Art
Book cover for Fountains of Paradise Artist rendering of a space elevator What has continued to fascinate me about the topics we cover in this course is how each different field overlaps with one another. The most recent case of this is the overlap between nanotechnology and space. This crossover makes sense, seeing that nanotech and space are both rapidly advancing fields with great potential for discovery. One of the most well known examples of these two subjects interacting with each other is the potential use of carbon nanotubes for the creation of a space elevator, a concept initially described within the science fiction novel Fountains of Paradise. While this idea is still in a conceptual form (and there is new research showing that carbon nanotube space elevators are not realistic due to the fact that carbon nanotubes lose a significant amount of structural integrity from just a single molecule being out of place), it will be interesting to see how this current idea i