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.
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
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.
Nobody goes on foot from sea level to the top of the mountain
Tim Macartney-Snape climbed Mount Everest that way. It took him 3 months.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Macartney-Snape#Everest:_Sea_to_Summit_ExpeditionThe exception that proves the rule.
But thank you, that’s pretty interesting.
What rule? “Don’t use absolutes”? 🤪
If it’s noteworthy that he did this, it must be rare. So this tells us most don’t.
I learned from experience that vehicles lose torque the higher the elevation due to the thinning of oxygen. I think it was something like 30% per kilometer in elevation. That being said I’m sure there’s a level where they can’t drive anymore.
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.
That’s unlikely to happen. Helicopters can’t fly that high, the air is too thin. Similarly, VTOL jets can’t hover at high altitude. You’d need something akin to a SpaceX rocket to manage that.
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.
That’s a misleading graph as it starts at 4000m
What’s misleading about it?
Everest isn’t 8000 meters from the base to peak. It’s 8000 meters at the peak but the foothills are several hundred meters high before you even get to everest. The buildings shown would have to be shown below ground if we really wanted to see them compared to everest’s height.- The buildings are shown as you would see them if they were built at the base of the mountain, to show its size. The sea level is irrelevant for this illustration.
- This isn’t Mount Everest.
Then why is the top listed as
everest’s heightk2’s height (just woke up and can’t read yet), ? It should list height from base to peak, not sea level to peak. It’s misleading this way.It shows the height above sea level at the base, too.
Well fuck, not only did i misread the mountain but i completely missed the smudge that looks like snow stating the starting height.
I stand corrected. I’m going for coffee so i can look like less of a dipshit today.
Enjoy your coffee, friend!
Buildings and mountain are shown at actual size. The graphic is only comparing prominence.
The misleading part is having the picture labeled as the height of k2 here. The height listed should be its prominence not sea level to peak.
People generally refer to mountains by their altitude, and buildings by prominence. Those that are aware of the difference can subtract 4000 from 8611. Those that are not would be confused by different labeling.
That’s not the issue i had with the photo. It was it not being labeled at the proper height from the base. I didn’t notice the label at the bottom hence the strike-thru of my comment.
Those that don’t completely read the comment thread can be confused by different markup labeling.
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?
This makes thebuildings more impressive to me
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.
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.
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.
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
Those buildings are at least approximately to scale as those 828 meters fit in the top 4611 meters roughly 5 times. If you made them half as tall it would be all wrong.
But you’re only seeing half the mountain.
Hm? Bottom of the picture is at 4000 m above sea level?
Yep
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