'Hey Bill Nye, Can We Use Giant Magnets to Build a Space Elevator?' #TuesdaysWithBill | Big Think
Nick here. I was wondering if it’s possible to take two giant magnets and use the repulsion force between the two to lift objects into space, or can we set up stages along the way up and how that attraction and repulsion force send a type of space elevator up to the moon or anywhere we want to go. Let me know what you think.
Nick, Nick, Nick. This is an interesting question. Let me say though, starting out, we all — when you play with magnets and you feel the repulsive force, it seems strong. But notice that it acts over a very short distance. Just nominally, it goes – it’s not perfect, but you can estimate it by saying it goes off as the cube of the distance. So if you have magnets this far apart and you make them twice that far apart, they only have an eighth as much umph.
So using a magnet to push things up as high as the atmosphere would take an enormously strong magnet, and where would that energy come from? And to give you an idea of the kind of energy we’re talking about, the particle collider in Switzerland, which we call CERN, the Center for Nuclear Research — but in French the adjective is at the end. That takes the electricity of a small city to keep protons going in a circle, just protons. So just imagine how much magnetism you would need to push something of reasonable mass up into the sky. It would take a huge amount of energy.
So shooting from the hip, I’d say it’s really not possible. With that said, I like the way you think. Then you also referred to using stages to get the magnet, this magnetic car or craft pushed up. Keep in mind that whatever you push it up from has to be pushed from a place which is somehow anchored to the Earth or magnetically repulsed from the Earth. So it becomes really difficult practically to have a stack of magnets that’s stable, that has all that energy required to create that much magnetism. You probably couldn’t do it. But that’s very creative. That was cool. Carry on, Nick.