Of course Australia is fiction. Who could possibly believe great big deer hopping around on their back legs wielding arms more racked than Schwarzenegger's, egg-laying duck-billed beavers with venomous hind toes, six foot tall birds powerful enough to defeat an army, and drunk teddy bears?
C'mon, pull the other one, it has bells on.
C'mon, pull the other one, it has bells on.
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Freeman Dyson for the win!Clearly a few here never heard of the very solid Physics and Engineering backed:
it is SO good I reread it at least once a year.
And which not surprisingly, continued in:
all based in physsically possible Mechanics:
https://larryniven.fandom.com/wiki/Ringworld
It contradicts no Physics Laws, it´s simply HUGE !!!
A belt of steel sheet metal, the diameter of Earth orbit, (and so at the proper distance around a central Sun), with all of an Earth sized planet mass (water, stone, atmosphere) on its inner surface.
Metal belt has Geographical relief "stamped in" so you have all kinds of terrain represented, from deep oceans to high mountains and anything in between.
Yes, of course, his was the original concept.
That said, I find a ring rotating at adequate speed both more stable structurally and providing "fake gravity" to its inhabitants through centrifugal force, not so sure how to achieve that inside a hollow sphere.
They might live in the outside, of course, and rely on regular Gravity, but then it would be a dark World (the Sun staying inside at the center).
Oh well 🙂
That said, I find a ring rotating at adequate speed both more stable structurally and providing "fake gravity" to its inhabitants through centrifugal force, not so sure how to achieve that inside a hollow sphere.
They might live in the outside, of course, and rely on regular Gravity, but then it would be a dark World (the Sun staying inside at the center).
Oh well 🙂
It seems donut shaped planets are scientifically studied:
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-gravitational-field-of-a-torus-shaped-planet
Great book! I love Niven's incredible imagination. It's been a few years since I last read it.
<snip>
all based in physsically possible Mechanics:
As far as physics goes, it turns out that a ring world isn't stable, in the way that an orbiting planet is. The laws of gravity are unkind to Niven - the ring won't remain stably in position around its sun. I'll admit to a twinge of disappointment when I first found that out. 😀
The problem is the inverse square law. If a small disturbance pushed Ringworld even slightly off-centre wrt its sun, gravity would pull harder on the nearer portion, pulling Ringworld even further off-centre. The system is radially unstable, and the ring will drift further and further off-centre, until one side of it gets close enough to its sun to burn.
Luckily, even those of us with much less imagination than Niven can think of a fix. Ringworld just needs to be fitted with an enormous number of gigantic thrusters, connected to solar-powered supercomputers, that constantly fire the thrusters as needed to keep the ringworld where it belongs. An enormous active feedback loop. Surely engineers capable of building Ringworld are also capable of building the active stabilization necessary to keep it in place. 😀
The thrusters need to eject mass to have any effect. Where can they get this mass? Maybe they skim off ions from their own sun. Maybe they use enormous scoop-shaped force fields to collect interstellar hydrogen.
Ironically, flat-earth morons are probably more willing to believe that Ringworld is real (and their hero Elon Musk will take them there soon), than to believe that Australia exists.
Time to go beat my head against a wall. I can no longer bear the rapidly growing stupidity of our supposedly intelligent species. 😡
-Gnobuddy
Bear in mind this assumption is uttered by humans exclusively, and we are certainly biased. Or did you pick up this statement from any other species?
Yes, and we were so convinced of our cleverness, that we put it right into the name we chose for our species: Homo Sapiens.
"Sapient" means "wise", as I'm sure you already know.
Now we have become so "wise" that millions of us believe the earth is flat, COVID is a hoax, and other equally idiotic things.
-Gnobuddy
Not sure I understand the ring thing. How do you produce night? I understand that night is a wee important to the, uh, what are they called again? Oh ya, living things.
Shadow squares orbiting inside the ring.
They could double as solar collectors on the sun facing side.
Cool man. Shadow squares. Reminds me of my screen saver.
Those must be as easy to implement as the ring thing. I am guessing they have to be rather tall to be as effective as the dark side of the planet. Now don't call me skeptical. I was born at night but it wasn't last night and I am beginning to see the light...
...when it should be dark.
Suddenly setting up camp on Mars seem strangely sane.
Those must be as easy to implement as the ring thing. I am guessing they have to be rather tall to be as effective as the dark side of the planet. Now don't call me skeptical. I was born at night but it wasn't last night and I am beginning to see the light...
...when it should be dark.
Suddenly setting up camp on Mars seem strangely sane.
As sane as sticking people into a gigantic vacuum chamber and shooting them from Vegas to Los Angeles, maybe? 🙄
Musk puts these idiotic ideas out there, and always ends up richer, because most people don't seem to realize just how ridiculous they are. End result, Tesla stocks soar even higher. Musk is even richer than before. And all that fawning attention feeds the fuel of his mighty ego. On to the next even more idiotic idea!
Back to your earlier post. It's not clear to me that day and night are both necessary for life. On earth, we have lots of deep-ocean life that lives in a perpetually dark world - no sunlight ever gets down there, so it's endless night, and has been for some 3.8 billion years. Yet deep-sea fish, starfish, crustaceans, worms, and bacteria have all been living down there for hundreds of millions of years.
There are also lots of creatures (fish, crabs, etc) that live deep inside cave systems, where there is no sunlight, ever. Many of those creatures no longer have functioning eyes, because they are useless anyway.
Since Earth doesn't have any places that have no night (maybe Tokyo? 🙂 ), we don't have any living things that evolved to live in perpetual sunshine. But it if life can get along with no light at all, why shouldn't other lifeforms evolve to live with endless light? Seems perfectly possible to me.
Now humans might not do so well in endless sunshine. But fortunately, we've invented buildings, window shutters, drapes, and blindfolds. 😀
A friend went to Norway for a physics conference one summer. He told me that by the third day he was half-insane from lack of sleep; sufficient sunlight seeped into his hotel room to make it impossible for him to sleep for long.
After that, he wised up. At the end of the day he would lie down to sleep, and wrap one of his shirts over his head as soon as he lay down. He finally managed to get a good night's sleep.
I bet Norwegians already knew of plenty of solutions to his problem, but he was probably too frustrated to look for them, and maybe too impoverished to buy them (we were both starving college students at the time).
-Gnobuddy
That.
No real need for day-night sequence within 24 hours, we simply adapted to it, since it was a reality of life anyway.
And way up North or South,let alone at the poles, 6 month day/night cycles are the norm.
No real need for day-night sequence within 24 hours, we simply adapted to it, since it was a reality of life anyway.
And way up North or South,let alone at the poles, 6 month day/night cycles are the norm.
That is not classic Flat Earth doctrine. But there are always new ideas and beliefs over time, no matter the sect. Things change.
It's worse than that, the idiots called modern man "homo sapiens sapiens'- 'wise wise man'. A bunch of wise guys! Classic example of Dunning-Kreuger syndrome- they think they are the smartest, they give cartoon coyotes a bad name- "Super Genius, I like the sound of that!!"
At Acme Corp., we agree with old Albert "there are only two things that are infinite; the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the universe"
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At the end of my lunch break today, I sat down with a cup of coffee on an outdoor bench facing a patch of grass and a few trees. There was a little nip in the air - after weeks of burning heat, now we're getting our first hints that winter is coming to British Columbia soon.
The local squirrels had noticed, too. I saw two squirrels on the ground, both busily burying unidentifiable bits of food. They're starting to get ready for a few months of winter.
I bet plants / trees (all vegetation, really ) would love endless sun. They could photosynthesize round the clock, and never have to shed their leaves (which is an enormous loss of hard-earned resources, which then has to be built back up every Spring).
Incredibly, I found out some years ago that there are a few solar powered animals, too. They might like endless sunshine, too:
1) Golden Jellyfish in Palau. Their bodies have absorbed algae, which generate the food the jellies survive on. The jellies follow the sun so the symbiotic algae get as much sunlight as possible: https://blogs.unimelb.edu.au/sciencecommunication/2014/09/02/swimming-amongst-the-deadly/
2) Some marine flatworms have performed exactly the same trick: they ingest algae, then incorporate the algae into their body tissues. From then on, the worms are solar powered: https://www.newscientist.com/articl...a-superorganism-that-becomes-a-giant-seaweed/
3) Solar powered marine slugs (Nat Geo may shut down the page and demand your email; give them a fake one): https://www.nationalgeographic.com/...ered-photosynthetic-sea-slugs-in-decline-news
4) Solar powered land snails. I read about these years ago - they basically perform the same trick, absorbing green algae into their translucent bodies in summer months, and the algae generates supplemental energy for the snails during periods of sunshine. Traveling on land needs more energy than floating in water, so these snails also eat. They apparently eject the algae every winter (maybe they don't want extra mouths to feed).
Unfortunately, I can't find a link to any information about these snails on the 'Web.
-Gnobuddy
"Wise wise man" has now destroyed our own planetary weather system to the point where right now, 33 million Pakistanis, 7.2 million Bangladeshis, and an unknown number of millions of Indians, have all become climate refugees in just the last few months alone.
Forty to fifty million people, all made homeless, many destitute, hungry, and struggling to survive, in just a few months of torrential rain. It boggles the mind.
For reference, the entire population of Canada is estimated to be between 38 and 39 million this year.
-Gnobuddy
I'm pretty sure, at least in the 2nd book (..Engineers), Niven put stabilizing thrusters on Ringworld (to hush critical fans). For literary tension, the techs left (taking the thrusters) a long time back and the ring WILL go bad "soon", although other events may make that moot. (Someone here had that as a signature? Tnuctipun?)
Psst...Hey buddy...ya wanna buy some unobtanium? I got some here fer sale real cheap! It fell off a delivery truck.
But then again in the mythical country called Australia all trees, except for some in Tasmania, keep their leaves all year round. In the alpine altitudes the snow gums keep their leaves even when covered with snow.I think it's the trees in the Northern Hemisphere that have a problem 🙂