That’s a misleading graph as it starts at 4000m
I think this is more to visualize the size of the ascent on K2, rather than the true size of the mountain.
at 800m the Burj is still at 1/10 of the 2nd tallest mountain… seems big no?
What’s misleading?
It literally tells you the foot of the mountain is already around 4000m above sea level.
Is the picture to scale in both height and width?
It’s missing 4K, better would be if the buildings were half their current size
Or mountain more accurately depicted in size:
Hm? Bottom of the picture is at 4000 m above sea level?
Yep
This makes thebuildings more impressive to me
Wow the Mia Khalifa is barely a dot on there. I know which one I want to get on top of.
Which beast?
Technical question for actual climbers.
How high up can you go by vehicle and still say you ‘climbed’ the mountain?
Nobody goes on foot from sea level to the top of the mountain, so at what point does the ascent start?
If you’re not starting on foot from the bottom of the Mariana Trench, you’re just a filthy casual.
The practical answer is: you drive as far as you legally can.
As a disclaimer, pictured here are the Himalayas, which are at a completely different scale to where I’ve been, but in my experience there are typically parking spaces/bus stops at the end of public roads. At this point you leave the built up infrastructure and enter nature, and these are often located in a place where the flatter valley ends and a steeper ascent begins. In many cases there are smaller private roads further up to service more remote cabins or farmsteads. Sometimes there are even taxi services that drive you further along using private roads, which can be seen as not fully scaling the mountain yourself. Generally, the closest public parking is considered the starting point and most people will therefore start at the same spot.
I expect that by 2050 it will be common for the 0.01% to land a flying car 100 meters from the summit and then claim to have conquered the peak.
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‘flying car’
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For Everest in particular, Base Camp 1 is at about 4000m IIRC, and that’s where ascents typically start after some time to acclimate to the already high altitude.
I mean you park the car in the parking lot and then you start at the trailhead. That’s really as far as you’re allowed to drive up, not like you can drive on the hiking trail
Not a climber but I’m assuming the base of the mountain.
I guess that’s what my question is. what is considered ‘the base?’
I suppose it varies for each mountain.
It is entirely subjective. So is the height of a mountain as a result.
Correlation is not causation.
I very much enjoy the friendship and company of hobby climbers. Professional climbers are, in my experience, 10% incredible and kind people with amazing life stories, 90% self aggrandising spoiled narcissists who think they’re invincible, but should instead be dead without the support of dozens of people in their lives, who have never received proper credit or even an honest humble thanks.
Most people who go to do climbs like Annapurna and Everest are already a negative in my book.
Billy Brennan: So Mr. Kirby, when you climbed K2, did you base camp at twenty-five or thirty thousand feet?
Paul Kirby: Thirty thousand feet, we were pretty close to the top.
Billy Brennan: You were about a thousand feet above, actually.
I was going to say I’m very impressed with those buildings actually considering how thin and scrawny they are in comparison, but then I realized 4000m of mountain height from the sea level are technically not visible in this picture.
Context: the foot of Mt. Everest is in itself higher than most mountains. And then on top of all that there is an actual mountain peak you can see on the pictures.
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Can you beat the Aggro Crag?
Can’t imagine the amount of force that pushed these huge mountains up, with their immeasurable mass. Wow.
That’s why, put a mass accelerator up there to kickstart space launches.Yees, maybe not on Mt. Everest. But there are plenty of developed areas with mountains.In a sci-fi setting I love, they use Kilimandjaro as the base of the space elevator. Would be interesting to see Africa become a space hub.
Mass launchers on Earth would work for things that can sustain large amounts of acceleration. That rules out a lot of things we launch into space. A mass launcher that would be as gentle as a rocket launch would stretch hundreds if not thousands of kilometers and need either a gradual slope or a very wide curve to avoid the side forces. Mass drivers are too good at what they do at their full capacity, and need a lot of room to do it slower.
On the Moon, a mass driver is a no brainer and could launch people in a short run. It’s Earth’s gravity that’s the problem. It sucks.
But it would be a good enough solution to save the whole 1st stage or 2/3 of the mass, no? Since the wind resistance quadruples all few km down there and all.That opens up another problem that I’ve seen talked about. The air that is left at the end. So for a mass driver to work, it needs to be close to a vacuum, otherwise you’ve got all the air in the way. Another reason the Moon is so easy. So when the payload that we can send through this ultimate roller coaster gets to the end at the top (wherever the top is), how do you manage an airlock there? It can’t be open long, otherwise the thin air will start filling the tube and be a barrier to run into, but it can’t open at the last millisecond because what if it doesn’t open fast enough (for whatever reason)? Plus, if it got through the airlock, it’s still going to run into the thin air outside, which will be like hitting a sudden brick wall at that speed.
I’ve loved the idea of mass drivers since I was a kid in the 70s dreaming of space colonies. But there are some serious problems to overcome on a 1 G planet with an atmosphere.
As far as the mechanisms of the mass driver itself and the power, I think that’s doable even for large loads. It just doesn’t work for other reasons. The opposite of a mass driver is an electromagnetic drive and we do that in limited fashion on some trains and other places. They would also be an awesome low acceleration drive for something like asteroid movement, using the slugs of mass on the body itself to change its vectors. Although that bears the Mass Effect warning about shooting without a target, it will ruin someone’s day one day.
To make something able to handle higher g forces you must make it heavier, if it is heavier you require more fuel and launch power to get it to orbit. Mass drivers for orbit are of fairly dubious utility, especially for all but very compact very dense payloads. Being higher altitude at launch is of even more dubious utility for rocket launches, very little of a rockets energy is spent gaining altitude against gravity, as all fuel used fighting gravity is wasted. The bulk of a rockets thrust is used accelerating the rocket to orbital velocity. Even airplane launched rockets see limited use. For reference, the delta v (a measurement of how much a rocket can change the velocity of its payload) budget for low earth orbit is generally 9,300 to 10,000 m/s, the orbital velocity there is about 7,800 m/s. We’re talking about a fairly small fraction of a rockets ability saved before we figure in the expense and risk with making your payload and stages so much stronger and risking your delicate and typically much more expensive than the rocket payload with a much more physically violent launch. And the first chunk of a rocket launch is when you burn off a ton of the fuel while the rocket doesn’t get that much lighter relatively speaking, you’re mostly paying for fuel at that part of the process, and the fuel is far and away the cheapest part of a rocket.
Also had another thought on that pesky air in the way. Something related to your point is called Max q and occurs very high up still in the atmosphere, even above most of the air, because of the speed also involved. The advantage of a rocket is that they can manage the ratio by backing off the throttle until getting past that point. But important to this conversation is how high that occurs. Even if the mass driving avoids the lower air, it still has to come out of the tube at a comparable speed to attain orbit, so it will run into its own Max q type effects as it exits, and then even further up. The stress on a vehicle would certainly be far greater than “just” a rocket launch.
