Comprehending the very different

The idea that an elevator-like device could go in a huge loop around the Earth, could be incomprehensible especially to a mind, accustomed to reaction engined vehicles to space, struggling to comprehend how an elevator could go straight up all the way to beyond GEO, being aware of the limits of existing tall buildings and towers. Compressional strength of materials, and the instability at the top of very tall thin compressional structures, appears to put a ceiling on how high one can build, and that limit is nowhere near "space", although compressional metal structures pressurized internally could conceivable go up tens of miles. The vertical Space Elevator in public attention is of the anchored tether type, like a weight on the end of a string being whirled around, the whirling being done by the daily rotation of the Earth, and the counterweight out beyond GEO. The huge loop is quite different from either of these visions, however.

So, perhaps the loop elevator-like device can be initially comprehended by imagining an equatorial plane Earth orbit completely occupied by a rope, or even a thin stream of non-volatile liquid, which is rotating around the planet at orbital velocity; then shift from a circular to an elliptical orbit, compensating for the changes needed, until the elliptical orbit grazes the earth's equatorial surface and precesses around synchronous with the Earth's daily rotation, thus forming the basic structure from ground to high in space, even to GEO. Those "compensations", such as for the meteoric velocity as it streams through the earth's atmospheric part of the path, and for the differences in velocity along the elliptical orbital path, are what some specific technological coherent configuration provides, as the one described on my websites and several published papers do.

If I am unprepared to see something quite different from the usual, it may come and go without me fully seeing it, comprehending it. Worse, if I am very busy, unless my RAS perceived the new thing as dangerous, it may never make it all the way to my consciousness, and thus essentially never have been, never noticed. Maybe others are that way, too.

This is part of the tendency to see that which we are set up to see, to interpret it according to the context perceived, the pre-conditioning by others, in some cases. If I remember correctly, our brains take in sensual data (from eyes, ears, etc) at the rate of a million bits per second sum total, and only a little bit makes it all the way to our conscious noticing awareness. All the pre-processing that goes on to clear out the non-essentials is almost miraculous yet is imperfect. Similar things happen to other input information such as what we read; if there is no framework on which to place each new bit of info, unless it goes into the "I will figure this out later, maybe" mental shelf, it goes into the "bit bucket."

So, I have been dealing with this happening over the years as I attempt to get peoples' attention to the electrical space access technology concepts and what they could make possible in terms of civilizations major needs coming up too fast. Clearly my rantings about it all have gone into the "I don't know quite what it is" bit bucket, gone. Attempts to utilize the familiar, such as the centrifugally shaped cowboy's lasso, hula hoop, electric motor, often get ridiculed by the esteemed learned folk.