[TML] A new tourist ship design

[Knapp]

> On 1/13/08 6:15 AM, "Timothy Little" <tim at little-possums.net> wrote:
>
> > On Sun, Jan 13, 2008 at 09:06:46AM +0100, Knapp wrote:
> >
> >> Would it be nice to sit on the ball and look at the sky?
> >
> > Not if there's no atmosphere :-)
> >
> > Given a deep enough "gravity well", I think there could still be a few
> > niggling problems.  You may need to explicitly heat the ground, for
> > example, to replace convective and radiative heat losses from an
> > atmosphere hundreds of times larger than its area.  Convection
> > patterns would be really odd, though I don't know what effects that
> > would have.  Probably nothing that would matter to a tourist.
>
> I think heat loss would be a major issue, as the top of the atmosphere
> (calling it 100 km altitude) has 160,000 times the surface area of the
> "planetary" surface.  Even solar heat isn't going to be a great help.  Look
> how cold it gets just going up a mountain a few km tall!
>
> This leads to another issue:  On Earth, you can get away with the
> simplification that the atmospheric column bearing down on an area is a nice
> vertical column.  With a tiny planet and huge atmosphere, this
> simplification breaks down.  The atmosphere over an area is a cone spreading
> to possibly kilometers at the top.
>
> This reminds me of art by Patrick Woodroffe.  Scroll down to Pastures in the
> Sky:

So what does keep the atmosphere warm?
As I understood it, it was the sun shining on the land and that turns
the sunlight into heat that keeps the Earth warm. On the other side I
have read that the upper atmosphere is very hot. Then you have the
fact that heat rises. If it is the land that heats the air then why is
it could on the top of a mountain? Seems like this should be easy to
understand but something is missing in this picture.
Douglas  E Knapp