Scope
[Image: Kiss by Bridget Riley]
The financial system reminds of how Kim Stanley Robinson, the sci-fi author, describes a space elevator. This is a concept for getting from Earth into space without rockets — you basically have a single cable that goes from the equator all the way up into space, and you travel up along it in an elevator that takes five days.
Robinson, in his book Green Mars, describes the elevator like this:
“no one ever saw the full spectacle, for no witnesses had the senses necessary. Proportionally the cable was far thinner than a human hair – if it had been reduced to a hair’s diameter, it would still have been hundreds of kilometers long”
There’s this cable that is a hundred metres across, say, big, wide, but if you’re standing close enough to see it, you can’t see either end. Yet if you standing far enough away to to see both ends of the space elevator, it’s going to be too thin to make out. It’ll be invisible.