Yesterday I was stuck in our “elevator” for two hours. What a joke. It’s basically a cage pulled by ropes along the main mining shaft. There’s not a lot of gravity to overcome so there are hardly any security measures. The cage just pulls me along, for comfort. But yesterday the rope snapped and I had to climb the whole shaft myself in order to get things tied up again.
I wonder how this happened. Material fatigue? I’ll have to check the engine and the panels, too.
Now I’m thinking back to the old mass transportation we used to have. You remember those steel worms, those hellish creatures, metal tubes of many tons, gliding along on their steel wheels? My grandparents used to sit in these tubes for hours, seeing the landscape scroll past. Those trains were full, they said. So many people. It makes me nervous to think of more than four people in a room. This is a nightmare.
And yet. Think about it. Gravity is such as harsh master, there is no escaping it, dirtside. So they built a heavy contraption of iron and steel that minimised friction and would simply roll on for ever and ever. The only drawback being that you had to build those elaborate steel rails for them. It was a cost the old ones were willing to pay.