Fun math with a Space Elevator

I ran across an interesting blog post today at Rough Equivalents.  The author has calculated the weight and quantity needed for a substitute Elevator cable made out of bologna slices.  It would weigh approximately 61,589,647 pounds, contain 88,689,091,770 calories and 17,375,178 pounds of fat.  He has some other equivalents and asks readers to come up with their own.

Here’s mine:  There are eleven, individually-wrapped slices of Kraft American cheese in one inch.  We want them individually wrapped, of course, for sanitary purposes and to make repairs to the “Cheesevator” easier.  A kilometer contains 39,370.0787 inches (have to be exact, of course).  One hundred thousand kilometers, then, would contain 3,937,007,870 inches.  At 11 slices to the inch, this means that a Cheesevator would contain 43,307,086,570 slices of individually wrapped Kraft American cheese.  Each slice of this cheese contains 70 calories and 5 grams of fat giving us a grand total of over three trillion calories (3,031,496,059,900 to be exact) and over two hundred billion grams of fat (216,535,432,850 grams to be exact).

It’s also possible, of course, that the life of a Cheezevator would exceed the life of a carbon-nanotube tether – this stuff never goes bad…

Who said math wasn’t fun?