Stairs are one of the most fundamental simple machines to getting humanity to where we currently are. Without stairs, finding our way up buildings would be many thousands of times more difficult than it currently is, leaving us to use ropes and shimmy up them or install rock walls and risk climbing them every time we need to get to different floors.
Elevators, which have been around for well over two thousand years, dating back to the days of the ancient Romans, have virtually eliminated our need for stairs. While we do, in fact, need stairs around to opt for as an alternative to broken elevators or those that are highly prone to damage, such as during a building fire or earthquake.
Right now, the longest – or tallest, one should say, to be precise – outdoor elevator on the planet is located in China’s province of Zhangjiajie and is over 1,000 feet tall! Formally known as the Bailong Elevator or the Hundred Dragons Elevator, the glass-based elevator is tall – no doubt about it – but it isn’t as nearly as tall as the elevator that’s part of the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa, which is some 1,650 feet tall.
Scientists have recently been talking about creating an elevator between – believe it or not, it’s true – the Moon and planet Earth, which would be anywhere in the league of roughly 200,000 miles in length. Before getting too far ahead of ourselves, know that this proposed elevator wouldn’t be directly attached to the respective surfaces of the Earth and the Moon. Rather, it would be permanently affixed to the Moon deep below its surface and would extend – as mentioned above – about 200,000 miles toward the Earth. This elevator would stop at about 22,236 miles higher than the third rock from the Sun’s sea level, which is known in scientific terms as the geostationary orbit height, meaning that the elevator would move around in sync with the rotations of planet Earth, making the whole idea leaps and bounds easier.
The proposed elevator would not work well if it were attached to the surface of planet Earth because the Earth rotates completely every 24 hours, unlike the Moon, which never turns away from the Earth’s point of view because the face of the Moon – which isn’t made of cheese, something that would render this proposed project impossible – is tidally locked.
