Bill: Do you have any more details and/or references on McCarthy's & Moravec's schemes? Thx. At 08:32 PM 9/21/2014, Bill Gosper wrote:

John McCarthy once computed that an affordable column of tungsten (I forget his dimensions, something like a hundred meters by a few inches) would be a crust penetrator.

Hans Moravec designed towers many miles high rigidified by a circulating stream of superconducting "niobium cannonballs". You could also build very large "vacuum balloons" thus stiffened. --rwg