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An Elevator to Space

And I am not talking Arthur C. Clarke kind of science fiction.

"A start-up company from the Seattle area won $900,000 on Friday in a NASA contest to build a miniature prototype of a machine that could one day climb from Earth to outer space," according to a New York Times article here ...

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/science/space/08nasa.html?hpw

Arthur Clarke has of course envisioned high-rise buildings going all the way up to geostationary orbit at 36,000 kms.

Well, I would not be around to witness any of that ...

Which is just as well because I don't have the brains either to develop something like that ...

As each generation gives way to the next smarter generation, humans will eventually acquire the smarts to realize what might seem today to be crazy dreams.

But then the cellphones that we find to be so commonplace today would have seemed quite magical one century ago ... same goes for airplanes.

There's no reason why people won't go to Mars for their honeymoon in the next 100 years ... may be only the rich would get to do that and others would enjoy it only vicariously ... by watching it on a show on the Discovery Channel or the Travel & Living Channel or the National Geographic Channel ...

What do you think?
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