Induced radioactivity is mostly the result of contamination from radioactive materials. Whilst it's possible to induce radioactivity from gamma rays directly, you're talking "background noise" levels of radiation. Which is to say, the cable isn't going to become notably radioactive, and even then, the part that does, will be the part that isn't protected by the atmosphere. And for people to navigate those areas of space safely, we already need shielding to protect us from the suns electromagnetic radiation, so a small increase in radiation from the cable isn't going to make much of a difference to anything.
this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2026
66 points (94.6% liked)
No Stupid Questions
45519 readers
725 users here now
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Compare that possibility to the radiation from sunlight. I wouldn't worry about radiation, I would be more concerned about altering earths rotation, or damage caused if the space elevator were to collapse.
Yeah the ~~dearth of~~ death and destruction left by it falling would be insane. I assume it would have to be built along mainly west coasts to mitigate risks. But maybe itβs more important to be somewhere with less hurricane/cyclone risks, and with really stable bedrock obviously.
Edited out some auto correct nonsense
Dearth means βa striking lack of,β as in βdearth of evidence.β (No evidence)
It was supposed to say βdeath andβ autocorrect had other ideas I guess.
Ooh, that makes more sense. Auto correct is getting shittier by the day. Iβve got a new conspiracy theory that itβs a push to get us to use voice to text more, to help train our robot replacements.
Its still funny to read this as you having a concern about the striking lack of distruction caused by space elevator collapse. Maybe the elevator debris all got thrown into orbit?
In fairness, if it fell, and somehow left no trace of its existence upon hitting the ground, that would also be insane, albeit in a different way.
By the necessities of its design a space elevator has to reach geostationary orbit, which would make it tall enough to wrap around the planet twice if it fell. Wouldn't really matter if you built it on a west coast or not.
A geostationary orbit is ~35,000km from the surface of the earth. The circumference of the earth is ~40,000km.
Ah thanks, I was a dingus and looked up the diameter instead of the circumference. Still doesn't really matter where you build it. No matter what it's fucking up a a good portion of the equator if it falls.
It still can't really fall. It'd be moving incredibly fast sideways. Fast enough to miss the Earth for a while. Geo stationary orbit is the point where orbital speed matches Earth's rotational speed, so if it's anchored at the ground, then it's at orbital speed if at GEO. The higher the orbit, the slower the orbital speed. So using a higher orbit to maintain tension means it'd be traveling beyond escape velocity, held down by the cable. A break would release the mass into the solar system
I think that depends on how big the tether is tbh. It has to be usable as an elevator so it can't just be a thin cable. And your scenario is assuming that it would be cut down near the base, if it's damaged anywhere higher up anything below the cut will fall down to earth.
Yeah thatβs kinda what I was envisioning, maybe half the tether zingin off into space when the other half fell into the pacific or desert, but even half is gonna be like 15,000km I guess.
Also wasnβt there a scenario like this in one of the Mars Trilogy books?
Not certain about the mars trilogy but there is a collapsing space elevator in the foundation series (at least on the show, haven't read the books yet.)
load more comments
(1 replies)
Actually, a good ways passed geostationary orbit if I remember correctly. It needs centrifugal force to keep the cable taut, since it won't be supporting its weight from the surface.
you'd get baked like Marie Curie's ovaries
It wasn't just the ovaries, it was the whole Marie
(and Pierre too, but he died from an accident before the radiation could kill him)
And tbf, her ovaries worked fine for quite some time it seems - she had two daughters who both were exceptional people in their fields as well - one got a nobel prize in chemistry, the other was a Pulitzer prize nominee, fought the nazis, was a war correspondent, had role in the establishment of NATO and UNICEF and -as a representative of UNICEF and together with her husband received a nobel peace price for the organisation. The later one died in 2007,btw.
(The whole family is totally crazy,btw. Both on her sisters and cousins side, but also her daughters and grandchildren and now grandgrandchildren. Everyone excelled in their scientific field)
Its not really how radiation work, radiation don't move trough a tube and material don't necessarily get radioactive from being irradiated, actually the cable would contribute stopping radiation, and radiation resistance is definitely something you need to consider in a space elevator material.
That's the least of the worries facing the construction of a skyhook. I don't think Heinlein's Kenya Beanstalk is possible. It would have to stretch out so far to defeat gravity that it would hit so many satellites. That's the first issue that pops to mind.
That's not really much of a concern unless you aim satellites directly at it. There's plenty of space in space.
Yeah, it's not rwally satellites that are the problem. There's so much debris in orbit from our space programs, it's starting to form an entire layer around the planet. The risk of collision from this debris is constantly growing.
But thereβs really not that much debris. Certain orbits can get packed but thereβs plenty of availability. Also stuff in LEO deorbits pretty fast.
Kessler Syndrome. The worst part is that, at some point, the risk of collision becomes so great that the problem becomes self-perpetuating, further increasing the risk until we can't leave Earth anymore.
Would it not be self-correcting in the end? The various bits of debris that form the Kessler cloud would collide so much that they would eventually fragment into little more than dust, or lose enough energy that they are no longer in a stable orbit?
There's no appreciable drag up there, so if it's in orbit it's going to be in orbit for a while, regardless of how big or small it is. Is the amount of energy lost to ripping the debris apart enough to eventually de-orbit the object? I honestly don't know. My immediate thought is no, barring outside factors, because if it did spacecraft would be torn apart during their de-orbit burns; but I honestly can't get my brain around that well enough to be certain (maybe the longer time a spacecraft takes de-orbiting reduces the stresses that a piece of space junk suffers instantly).
The kind of crazy thing is that, if a 1,000kg satellite orbiting at an altitude of 36km and a speed of 11,000kph breaks into a thousand pieces, each of those 1kg pieces are still traveling at an altitude of 36km and a speed of 11,000kph.
Radiation isn't water and the cable wouldn't be absorbitant. π€¨
We have a free eternal source of energy.
It's called solar.
If a space elevator became a reality, the real problem would be that it can get destroyed easily by terrorists or even just a defective satellite in low earth orbit crashing into it.
And then you have a 20000 mile long cable wrapping around earth at supersonic speeds.
If a space elevator happened, I would certainly make sure I don't live in its flattening path around the equator
Just build it on one of the poles
load more comments
(15 replies)
Ada answered the question, but consider your question.
You said "leaving a spaceship with no suit". If your idea is that something left in space becomes dangerously radioactive then any space station or space ship would itself become dangerously radioactive.
So the answer is, no, things in space don't become dangerously radioactive. Also things in contact with radioactive substances don't themselves become radioactive except under extremely specific circumstances. Your house didn't become dangerously radioactive because of the radioactive americium-241 in the smoke detectors.
Any time you talk radiation, you need to be specific about what kind of particles, how much energy they have, and how much of it there is.
Most of the stuff in orbit is charged particles (electrons and small atoms) and low energy photons. Those get stopped by relatively thin layers of shielding, but if you're not careful you'll get cooked from raw heat.
Ionizing radiation like neutrons or x- and gamma-range photons can radioactivate materials, and take more shielding -- think feet of water or a couple inches of lead. Nuclear reactors have that, but spaceships don't. Fortunately unless you bring a reactor with you they're rare enough that it's not really necessary.
Substances become radioactive when they get hit by some kind of ionizing radiation and change into an isotope that itself emits radiation. Conducting radiation like a wick isn't really a thing.
you need really spicy photons for activation to happen
in space you also have protons some with relatively high energy. most of these come from solar wind and also can cause activation
load more comments
(1 replies)
I'm wondering what would keep the part in the atmosphere from building up a massive electrostatic charge.
The trick with a space elevator is that the cable needs to be very thin. The material needs to be strong. That's just two reasons why we're still far from putting that to any real use.
I don't think having a small line through our atmosphere will slowly poison us. The extra radiation that would make it through is probably a rounding error. The material would have to be such that it doesn't attract radiation. And even if we discovered that this could be a problem, if we have become smart enough to build this space elevator, we'll probably be smart enough to figure out a way to filter it out.
No extra radiation would make it through because that's not how radiation works.
view more: next βΊ