Pillar to the Sky

by William R. Forstchen

  “Before we can even do that,” Franklin replied, “we all know we still have to spend another ten billion to strengthen Pillar One for survivability from debris impacts and to handle any kind of real commercial load, unless Dr. Fuchida wishes to give us wire for free, and our allies in the launch business give us eight more launches to geosynch—three of them manned for long duration work up there—for free as well.”

  The Brit smiled and shook his head.

  “You have the launches at cost, I’ll concede that, my friend, but I am barely keeping my head above water as is. I’ve all but put into receivership all my other ventures to keep this one going.”

  “So what are you driving at, then?” the investor shouted.

  Franklin, still a bit of a showman at heart, put on a glove lined with nanotubes, reached under the podium, and produced what appeared to be a black but highly reflective ribbon nearly a foot across. He slowly turned it edgewise, and as he did so, it became almost invisible. It did not flutter, though, the way a ribbon of fabric would; it was perfectly rigid, like a ribbon of tungsten steel. As he turned it back toward his audience again that mirror-like sheen made it almost invisible.

  “This, my friends, is the stuff of the real tower, but we need what we are building right now in order to finally get this up there,” and as he spoke he nodded back to the tower, the spinner that had been timed to lift off just as he began speaking now a barely visible dot in the sky above.

  The room fell silent as he held the length of ribbon aloft. Although he did have a protective glove on, he did not seem all that nervous or careful handling it—unlike the time he first held up the nearly invisible wire before many in this group, wearing not just gloves but a protective suit in case an errant puff of air caused it to brush against his body.

  “The real tower—the tower I realized five years ago would have to be the real tower—will not be made out of the carbon nanotube strands we are now weaving behind me even as I speak. This, my friends, is the future of tower technology for at least the next twenty years or so, until someone smarter than all of us here thinks up a better idea that none of our team has cooked up yet. As wood and stone were replaced by iron, and iron by steel, so this will replace what we call wire, not just for building the Pillar but a whole new generation of construction projects down here on earth as well.”

  He spoke quickly now, so as not to be interrupted and deluged with questions.

  “Dr. Fuchida told me five years ago, when he started to mass-produce thread for the first time, that if you threw enough money at the problem and gave him enough time, he could weave what I am holding before you, but it would take at least several years. He finally achieved it three months before we launched our first thread.

  “Once Pillar One is sufficiently strengthened its cargo will consist solely of ribbon for several years to come, that and supplies for our astronauts working out at geosynch. There is no time to waste on commercial loads. It means delayed payoff for all of us, but the payoff will be there when we have completed Pillar Two.

  “With the first ribbon anchored, adding dozens more ribbons of carbon-60 nanotubing will become easier and cheaper. Haul them up on Pillar One, then drop them down and weave them in place for Pillar Two. Additional ribbons will be deployed as layers atop the first one to strengthen it, or could be run down either side of the first one and stapled or laminated in place, extending the Pillar outward—a dozen meters or more in width, if desired—with stunning load-bearing capacities.

  “Then the real payoff begins, my friends. This is not so much about what goes up but what comes down. We’ve gone public with that concept already, this is about clean solar energy. We’re weaving several threads into Pillar One to test the concept. But once Pillar Two, made of ribbon, starts to go online, we can layer in super conductive carbon nanotubing that eventually will handle gigawatts of power. There is the ultimate payoff.”

  He paused, taking a deep breath.

  “But it will take time. Five years or more at least and not five or six months, as some of you thought, would be the case for financial return.”

  “Financial return you promised us,” the angry investor retorted with barely concealed rage.

  Franklin hesitated for a moment.

  “I’m in this for the long haul, my friends. Not just for the long haul when it comes to how much money is still in my account on the day I die. I’m in it for the long haul of what it means to future generations.”

  He fell silent and nodded toward where Victoria and Jason were seated. Such a gesture from nearly anyone else would have triggered chuckles of derision by the hard-edged investors in the room. But no one dared snicker when a man with the reputation of Franklin Smith made such a gesture. All knew it was from his heart.

  “A foot of ribbon, even with everything Fuchida’s team had learned with mass production of wire, will still cost thirty times more than a similar strand of nanotubing,” he continued, protests silenced for the moment. “Cost for a functional ribbon tower, as a starter, will run an additional hundred billion.

  “What we are gaining from our Pillar One, as I call it, is not just the ability to haul up the construction material for Pillar Two at dollars per pound versus a hundred thousand per pound; we are training ourselves in how to do it, safer, cheaper, and better. Without Pillar One, Pillar Two will be impossible, or so prohibitive in cost no individual, firm, or nation will ever dare to venture it, and thus, we will continue to slowly stew in our own juices and in another fifty years, a hundred at most, our technological civilization will collapse.

  “With that thought in mind, I am asking you to stick with me through this. I have a fondness for Lincoln that transcends the fact that my great-grandparents were born into slavery. I have a fondness for his vision of the future of America as the preeminent technological power of the world if the crisis of the Civil War could be transcended. At this moment I think of one of my favorite quotes from him that ‘we shall either nobly save, or meanly lose the last best hope of mankind.’ Pillar One is the last best hope of mankind.”

  He held up the ribbon again.

  “After that then this is the future.”

  “The bottom line for all of us as a team…?” someone asked.

  “How long before this next Pillar is capable of doing anything useful?” The investor, who was now pale-faced, shaking his head ruefully, finally asked, breaking the silence.

  Franklin hesitated. He rarely spoke from note cards and it was obvious to Gary that the answer had escaped him. Gary held up five fingers and mouthed the reply.

  “Five years,” Franklin replied. “Commercial loads on Pillar Two in five years and viable energy coming back down.”

  He caught his stride again and now offered an idea, suggested by one of his young staff which he knew just might capture the group’s imagination and the global press as well. “For a very sharp turnaround in investment, they could quickly expand the pillar, which would have to be done anyhow, to six meters in width up to five hundred miles and build the first substation there, leasing facilities for scientific observation and most definitely for tourists, who would be eager to spend a few nights at a hotel and stand on a platform to look straight down for five hundred miles. Victoria Morgan has even proposed a new sport out there.

  “What happens if at five hundred miles, while wearing a space suit, you just climbed over the safety railing of our facility there and jumped? Would you go into orbit?”

  Most knew the simple answer, but a few did look at him quizzically.

  Franklin nodded to Victoria, who stood up to speak.

  “At five hundred miles up,” she began calmly and with an authoritative voice, already used to speaking to large gatherings, though usually of students and the general public and not this hard-edged group, “the effect of gravity relative to the earth’s surface will only be 10 percent less. All this nonsense about zero gravity once in space, as you all know, is exactly that: nonsense. Astronauts appear to feel that t
hey are in zero gravity when orbiting the earth aboard the space station, but in reality, as they zip along at something like 17,000 miles an hour, 200 miles above the surface of the earth, they are actually falling around the earth. Gravity is still trying to pull them down, but as they fall back toward earth, their rate of fall exactly matches the curvature of the earth; therefore, they are forever ‘falling’ around the earth and thus have the illusion of being in zero gravity.

  “With our second pillar, with a station attached to it at the five-hundred-mile level, if you step over the safety rail at the platform, you will start to fall, though the angular momentum imparted by the tower will cause you to drift away from the tower even as you plummet to earth.

  “Recall a while back the jump from nearly twenty-five miles up by an ultimate skydiver leaping from a balloon taking him to the edge of space. In the near vacuum of that altitude, recall how startlingly quickly he accelerated up to past Mach 1. The tower will make that experience pale in comparison and draw thousands to try it.

  “It will be the ultimate sport. I call it space diving: fall until you hit the atmosphere, then deploy a mini heat shield; to decelerate, the heat shield folds up once well into the atmosphere, and a drogue chute at 50,000 feet deploys to stabilize to subsonic speeds; then free fall again and finally deploy a regular parachute to land. I see it as an Olympic sport in twelve years’ time, along with low-gravity soccer inside a contained sphere; and imagine the potentials for ballet, dance, how it will transform so many of our sports and arts…”

  Her voice trailed off. Talking about sports that might appeal to her generation was a rather low item on the agenda at the moment. Victoria started to sit down but Franklin shook his head and motioned to her to come up to the podium.

  “Most of you know Victoria Morgan, daughter of our esteemed colleagues Drs. Eva and Gary Morgan.”

  There were polite nods from the audience, a few smiles, but in general silence.

  “Victoria is working on her Ph.D. in electrical engineering at Purdue and it is her specialization that I wish her to talk about for a moment.”

  He stepped back and nodded to her to proceed.

  “There is a second purpose to the Five Hundred Mile Station,” she said. “It will be the power transfer station of the twenty-first century.”

  A few of the insiders were smiling but the rest looked a bit confused.

  “May I interrupt for just a moment here, Miss Morgan?” Franklin said. “I remind all of you that you signed some very stringent confidentiality papers in order to be part of this meeting. What is said in this room stays here until the board of Pillar Inc. decides to go public, because when it does, I think you will see just how disruptive the information can be to the global economic system we are now stuck with. But it will, as well, be the largest arrow in our quiver when it comes to gaining political support in some very key areas.”

  He stepped back, nodding for Victoria to continue, while on one side of the room a large screen flickered to life. It was an image of Pillar Two, but rather than just being a single ribbon into space, close to its base it looked more like a spiderweb, or a wagon wheel with a dozen spokes radiating out from it.

  This was not part of the plan, for her to explain the solar energy aspect of the tower, but he just smiled at her as he turned off his mike and affixed it to the lapel of her lightweight blazer.

  “It’s all yours, Victoria,” he whispered before switching the mike back on. “Your dissertation and dream, now go for it.”

  She looked at the image on the screen, smiled, took a deep breath, and faced the audience, launching in as if she had practiced this presentation for weeks. The only problem was to avoid eye contact with her parents who were obviously about to explode with pride.

  “This tower will be connected to solar arrays each a mile or more in width down its length. We already know that solar panels in space are the true clean source of energy for our world, it was postulated as far back as the 1970s by such visionaries as Dr. Jerry O’Neill and writers such as Clarke and Asimov. But the insurmountable question has always been how to get the energy the last two hundred miles from space to where it is needed on the earth’s surface.

  “There was talk of microwaving it, or using lasers, but we all know the absurdity of such proposals: even the most disbelieving when it comes to environmental impacts would quickly see the profound negative results, even if willing to accept the absurd costs involved for receiving stations. Pillar Two finally solves those questions.”

  She fished in her pockets for a laser pointer, a bit embarrassed to realize she had left it in her room; and there were some chuckles when her mother stood up, approached the podium and handed her one, with several people applauding Eva’s motherly gesture as she smiled at her daughter and returned to her seat.

  Victoria flicked it on and pointed at the screen.

  “Each of those spokes is yet another fascinating by-product of carbon-60 nanotubes. There were reports more than a decade ago that the tubes could be arranged for superconductivity. The team I am working with on this—and why I decided to get a Ph.D. electrical engineering with a specialization in space-related electrical engineering—relates not just to the solar panels but those spokes radiating out from the Five Hundred Mile Station, though in actuality I think positioning it closer to a thousand miles up is optimal.”

  She traced the line of one of the spokes attached the Pillar from its point of origin toward Hawaii.

  “The gigawatts of energy we harvest in space will be beamed down to the transfer station, and from there, via the radiating spokes of superconductive nanotubing, it will be piped the rest of the way to the earth’s surface, in this case to Hawaii.”

  No one spoke for a moment until the once angry investor, confused by this new twist, quietly asked, “But the weight of the cables? The transmission distance? How?”

  “That is why we need Pillar Two. Some in this room are understandably focused on what will go up that pillar. I have become far more interested in what will come down.

  “I will have to offer a nod to one of my professors, who we know is an opponent of this tower because of what she considers its disruptive technology. I took a course with her and it set me to thinking. I and most of my generation believe that, environmentally, we are approaching a dead end. Far more a concern to me at my age. And it struck me, to just disrupt the whole damn thing with a revolutionary answer, the same way problems of the past were solved with revolutionary answers. Think up something entirely new and off the charts, that once initiated will seem absolutely logical, even if disruptive to existing systems. It is the way coal replaced wood, and I bet a hell of a lot of wood choppers were upset with that one.”

  There were actually some chuckles at that.

  “When oil replaced coal as the primary driver of the industrial revolution of the early twentieth century there were massive economic disruptions in the coal fields of England and America, but should we ever go back to that fuel as many now claim we should? Now, we find ourselves running low on oil unless we increasingly pursue fracking and drill ever deeper at greater and greater cost. We need a new answer, a clean answer, and those of you in this room, when you look at the Pillar and the plan Franklin has laid out for Pillar Two, I see the answer for the future, not just in terms of energy, but our collapsing environment as well, and even the very existence of this nation which has hosted our project.”

  She gave a polite nod to the president of Kiribati who was front and center in the audience; he half stood, bowed in reply and there was a scattering of applause at their gesture of mutual respect.

  “We look at the two great wars of the twentieth century, a number of smaller ones, and the first major conflict of the twenty-first, and what has been the underlying cause? Energy. Oil. And as we run short, we know the economic disruption will grow worse while the environmental issues become ever more grave.”

  She paused, scanning her audience.

  “But I digress and,
sir, I have not yet answered your question,” she said calmly while looking at the confused investor.

  “To begin with, each of those spokes, in order to address the weight and stress factors, will be but single ribbons, capable of transmitting an output of one of those supposedly clean but rather inefficient windmills now marring the landscapes and seascapes of the world, and the revelations of their negative impact on wildlife and true efficiency. But in time…”

  She smiled.

  “The potential is limitless. That, ladies and gentlemen, is your true profit motive for building the tower. Fifty years hence, when the palaces of the current rulers of the world’s energy are disappearing into the sand, carbon nanotube towers—of which ours will be the first—will be the energy hubs of the twenty-first century. And you, supporters of this program, will be in on the ground floor of that investment.”

  She smiled and subtly nodded to Jason who had planted the idea.

  “If you lived a hundred and fifty years ago, think of the return on a ten-thousand-dollar investment with Carnegie, Rockefeller, or Tesla. I see an investment with Franklin Smith in the same light.”

  She paused, scanning her audience.

  Gary felt such an explosion of pride at this moment. His young lady had most definitely found a mentor as he had found one in Erich. It was Franklin Smith: his style of delivery, the way he could work an audience, that indefinable “something,” of a natural-born public speaker that Gary most definitely lacked. She had pulled it off with charming ease.

  The room was silent and Franklin came to her side.

  “And there is one final point here, my friends,” Franklin said with a smile. “Political support.”

  “How is that?” the investor asked, but all the anger was gone from his voice.

  “Taxes.”

  A mutter ran through the audience on hearing that one word. The economic picture of the last half of a decade was only getting worse as government after government sank deeper and deeper in red ink and felt the only answer was to just keep raising taxes yet higher.