Timeline for Why not build smaller Ringworlds?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
6 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jul 6 at 20:20 | comment | added | Mark Olson | @itai Dyson was thinking of something more like lots of small habitats independently circling the sun. As long as you don't demand that they be ringworlds, building them and keeping them stable and safe -- while still not easy -- would be much, much, much, much easier than building Ringworld. Requiring the habitat to be a ring around the sun, puts very severe constraints on it. Dyson was quite right that Ringworld is a much better means to a story, than a means to habitation. | |
| Jul 6 at 19:57 | comment | added | itai | As I mentioned in another comment, I now realize that the problem is that we're not sure what does Freeman Dyson's "lot of little ones" suggestion mean. Whatever it is, we must acknowledge that Dyson did know his physics, so it is unlikely that whatever he had in mind would have been less safe than the Ringworld described by Niven. | |
| Jul 6 at 13:16 | comment | added | Lorendiac | @nebogipfel I think I tended to assume, after I first read the book, that Niven's implication was: "Yes, I am now admitting for the record that a Ringworld can drift off-center over time. With multiple Ringworlds surrounding the same sun, there would be a high risk of a catastrophic collision between two or more Ringworlds someday, and the Pak Protectors certainly wouldn't want that to happen to their future descendants!" | |
| Jul 6 at 0:33 | comment | added | Mark Olson | Fair enough, but I don't think he gave the answer in the book, unless it was somewhere in the handwaving. (Ringworlds are unavoidably incredibly dangerous no matter how you build them, at least as long as you don't have access to miracles. But they're really neat.) | |
| Jul 6 at 0:22 | comment | added | nebogipfel | This answers the question stated in the subject line, but the body of the question asks what Niven meant when he said "the answer I've given in this book" (Ringworld Engineers). The answer would involve quoting some passage from that book. | |
| Jul 6 at 0:10 | history | answered | Mark Olson | CC BY-SA 4.0 |