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"Science Fiction is speculative fiction in which the author takes as his first postulate the real world as we know it, including all established facts and natural laws."
- Robert Heinlein
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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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Tech news articles related to Ringworld
Tech news articles related to works by Larry Niven
Ringworld-related
news articles:
- The Cygnus Bubble And Astroengineering
- A Solar System Swept Clean - For A Dyson Swarm
- Denmark Island Earth (Verdenskortet ala Ringworld)
| Real-Life Macau or Ghost In The Shell |
| Galini 3D Printed Sleeping Pod Tiny Houses |
| Seasteading Floating Cities |
| Aequoreas Floating Village 3D Printed From Ocean Junk |
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'The car surged and lifted, clearing its top by a negligible margin.'
Science fiction authors are serious about sleep, too.
'I had explained," said Nessus, "that our civilisation was dying in its own waste heat.'
'Just what did I want Flexible Frank to do? - any work a human being does around a house.'
SF writers have thought about this since the 19th century.
There's a lesson in this for neural net AI engineers everywhere.
