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"[Science fiction] is the one literary medium left in which we have a free hand. We can do any damn thing we please."
- Alfred Bester
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| Ringworld | ||
| A 50 foot thick ribbon of matter around a star, a million miles across and as long as Earth's orbital circumference. |
The central "character" of Ringworld is the world itself. An artifact that is a ribbon of matter with a star at it's center, it has over 3 million times as much surface area as the Earth. The ring rotates at 770 miles per second, providing centripetal force of roughly our gravity. What did it look like from the surface?
| The Ringworld had no horizon. There was no line where the land curved away from the sky. Rather, earth and sky seemed to merge in a region where details the size of continents would have been mere points, where vanishing point held his eyes fixed. |
| From Ringworld,
by Larry Niven. Published by Ballantine in 1970 Additional resources -
|
For a very nice mathematical treatment of the Ringworld, see The Physics of the Ringworld by Alan Eisinger.
The ring is a compromise between a normal planet and a Dyson sphere. With the ring you only get a fraction of the available sunlight, but you can see the stars and you don't need gravity generators.
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- The Cygnus Bubble And Astroengineering
- A Solar System Swept Clean - For A Dyson Swarm
- Denmark Island Earth (Verdenskortet ala Ringworld)
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| Rotating House in Bosnia |
| Voyager Luxury Space Hotel Launches In 2023 |
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'... the two pairs of waldoes in the screen followed in exact, simultaneous parallelism.'
'THE SPACE VESSEL was traveling swiftly… For over five thousand years they had Voyaged on and on.’
'They circled the vast audiences, dancing, twittering, chirping...'
'The sun-quilt was a patchwork of colors and materials on the inward side, but silvered on the outward side...'
'Jim, I saw them reduce four of my doctors and nurses into those little cubes!'
'Fats Jordan was hanging in the center of the Big Glass Balloon, hugging his guitar to his massive black belly above his purple shorts..'
'When confronted by hills, or rough terrain, it did not stop, but simply slowed until the task demanded equaled its steady power output.'
'... the brain is no longer subjected to the accustomed pull, and it expands slightly in all directions.'
