Rotating the sphere would create gravity via centrifugal force, but only the equatorial regions would reap the benefits. In its usual science fiction presentation as a "ping pong ball around a star," Niven said, a solid Dyson Sphere lacks gravity. When imagining the ring, Niven had started with the concept of a Dyson Sphere, an idea explored by physicist Freeman Dyson a decade prior to Ringworld's publication. According to Anders Sandberg, a research fellow at Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute who has studied megastructure concepts, a Ringworld "is an amazingly large structure that's way beyond what we can normally imagine, but it's also deeply problematic." Establishing Gravity The inner surface could be sculpted like Earth's surface-full of great (though shallow) oceans, soaring mountains, and prodigious farmland-or whatever its builders desired.Ĭould a Ringworld ever be made? While the concept does not bend physics past the point of breaking, it would require truly extreme engineering and an utter mastery of the forces of nature. Mountain "walls" a thousand miles high would line each rim, preventing the atmosphere from leaking into space. Niven figured a Ringworld would have a thickness of a few thousand feet, and require raw materials with a mass equal to that of Jupiter.
It will be some time before anyone complains about the crowding," Niven wrote in a 1974 essay entitled "Bigger Than Worlds." "The thing is roomy enough: three million times the area of the Earth. The vast landscape could comfortably support perhaps trillions of humans (or another similarly ambitious, technologically advanced race). The ring' would reach 600 million miles across and a million miles tall. Niven imagined a ring with a radius of 93 million miles-the sun-Earth distance-with the sun placed at the center. Sci-fi author Larry Niven conjured up such a megastructure for his award-winning 1970 book Ringworld. Someday, when humankind outgrows planet Earth, we might aim to build a habitat so vast we could never overpopulate it. Urn:oclc:6858375 Republisher_date 20121008002028 Republisher_operator Scandate 20121006021908 Scanner icon The triangle icon that indicates to play OL510404W Page-progression lr Page_number_confidence 93.16 Pages 382 Ppi 500 Related-external-id urn:isbn:0345334302 Urn:lcp:ringworldenginee00nive:epub:35d810c9-46ab-4877-b86d-51d40610fe1f Extramarc University of Toronto Foldoutcount 0 Identifier ringworldenginee00nive Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t9281kv1r Isbn 0030213762 Lccn 79018992 Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.20 Ocr_module_version 0.0.17 Openlibrary OL4415131M Openlibrary_edition Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 22:53:25 Boxid IA159902 Boxid_2 CH131114 Camera Canon EOS 5D Mark II City New York Donor
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