Ripley's Believe It or Not by Ripley’s Believe It or Not! for January 18, 2013

They were called space hoppers here and great fun they were too.

Message in a bottle…Fan mail from some flounder?!?

The message said one extra pint please

We called them Hippity Hops here

so in other words, you earthlings are building your planet a baseball bat? might come in handy for meteors & asteroids!

In 1784 Chunosuke Matsuyama sent a message detailing his and 43 shipmates’ shipwrecking in a bottle that washed ashore and was found by a Japanese seaweed collector in 1935, in the village of Hiraturemura, the birthplace of Chunosuke Matsuyama.

I’m a bit concerned about that space elevator that, you get a little too much weight in there, the elevator cab will stay in place and pull the space station down to earth!

is that the correct scale? the cable would have to be 40 000 miles long.

They would put the ‘space’ end in geostationary orbit at the equator, I believe the length of the carbon nanotubes would be about 60,000 miles, and it would be flexible enough to withstand wind (rotational speed is irrelevant since it will be in geostationary orbit.) Been a while since I read about it, but it sound promising though.

No thanks. I’ll take the stairs.

It was bottled up for a long time.

The orbiting platform may be weightless, but the rest of the cable is held in place by tension. What material can be 22,300 miles long and still withstand it’s own weight, PLUS the weight of whatever would be riding it? That much steel wire .090 inches diameter would weight 2,500,000 pounds!

Ever heard of real SCIENTIFIC Knowledge?WTF does the solar wind have to do with it?

The message in a bottle, wattidit say, wattidit say? As for the ball hopper, what a nuke nuke.

Four miles on a hoppity-hop doesn’t seem too far. They must be harder on the backside than I remember.

I hope the elevator works out. I would pay $$$ for that ride.