I just read Ringworld and I was really blown away and getting ready to read the sequel Ringworld II engineers I believe. I do wonder if ring world will ever big a big movie and merchandise hit like Star Wars and Star Trek? Ringworld is so Awesome and also got me to learn some things to help me to do scenry art of Ringworld that I'm trying to do in digital paint and Photoshop! I'm seeing so much Ringworlds and Halo Ring Worlds from so many artist out there on Deviantart that's now got me started it's so AWESOME!!! 😎🖒
After the second sexual revolution: Ringworld is rather dirty which is one of it's many charms along with the pupetteer and that ultimate character Luious Wu who first turned up in the short story There is a Tide from A Hole in Space which I am about to reread. I think Larry Niven's short stories are better that his novels and Protector not as good as Ring World. Protector like this Bowl of Heaven is much more contrived than the elegant simplicity of Ring World.
Gregory Benford called the Great Pyramids “dumb” technology. Anyone that builds things with their hands knows that is incorrect. They are astronomically aligned. They are made with very large blocks. The biggest base blocks are mind boggling. The technology that made them was very high. I love both of these men’s works. Ciao.
Joe Morgan They're "dumb" in the sense that they serve no purpose. In the same sense of the word that Niven refers to Ringworld as a "Big Dumb Object". That doesn't mean it didn't require high technology to build ringworld, its just superfluous when they could have just built a Dyson swarm, much more easily. Also, pyramids are the simplest shape to build. So simple, they occur by accident in nature, mountains. A skyscraper is much harder to build because its base isn't as wide as it is tall to support all the weight and keep it balanced. A skyscraper is also mostly empty space, a pyramid has almost no empty spaces in it. The pyramids are impressive for when they were built but they certainly aren't "high" technology. The egyptians didn't even have iron tools. Building the pyramids *despite* the lack of high tech (like electricity or even the steam engine) is what's impressive about them.
I have seen Tree structure fractal engine dyonic branch, spheroid structures around stars, similar to a fractal dyson. The truncks grab matter, the leaves are planet sized bowls, that spin round like fruit in the solar wind, very high magnetic, and artifis gravit, very high energy.
So, we should dismiss the entire Space Shuttle program and International Space Station, simply because Low Earth Orbit "doesn't count" as Outer Space? Got it.
Glad to hear them talking about the water on the Bowl. I thought that was one of the weaknesses of the original Ringworld novel. There simply didn't seem to be enough water to keep the temperatures stable. Water on Earth keeps our daytime and night time temperatures pretty close. The Ringworld would have had uncomfortable temperature swings, IMO.
I really doubt there is or ever will be any civilization that would need to harness the power from a sun, and take the time, energy and matter and build the thing ... because in the time you build it you would want to change things about it, and it is so big as to be ungainly and impossible to manage or maintain. It is a huge investment ... and for what ... lots and lots and lots ... almost infinite real estate. Why would an advanced civilization need so much real estate?
That's not correct except in limited circumstances. It is possible to have sex without contraceptives and avoid having a kid. Also ... as the population grows more and more time and resources must go towards raising children, and who has the time?
justgivemethetruth Have you read Ringworld? The civilization that built it is effectively immortal, but doesn't have FTL travel. Bearing those two things in mind, creating the maximal living surface around a single star makes perfect sense. Cannibalizing all the unlivable mass in the system (gas giants, everything outside the habitable zone) and turning it into surface area that can be lived on is a better option that colonizing another star system, without FTL. So yeah, if humans achieved biological immortality, there would eventually be so many of us that all the asteroids and moons in our system wouldn't be enough space. It would be impossible to enforce a "one child policy" or any sort of population control mechanisms over interplanetary distances. So we would start building artificial habitats (Oneal cylinders or a number of other designs) orbiting the sun. Eventually there would be so many it would form a Dyson swarm (google it). Building a solid ring that "orbits" a star is a great deal more complex though. Also the race that built Ringworld has a tendency to engage in atomic world ending wars when their population is too high in close proximity to each other. Which is another good reason to build the Ringworld, war over living space is never a concern, you could just keep walking forever and never see another civilization with how big the ringworld is. I recommend Isaac Arthur's video on Ringworlds if you want to better understand *why* one might build a ringworld, and the advantages of doing so. Artificial gravity generated by spin is a big one. Outside of magic, gravity will be one of the hardest things to reproduce that humans require for life.
It must suck for these science fiction writers born in the 1930's and 1940's who grew up reading Heinlein, witnessed the space program in the 1960's and predicated their careers on the idea that we had entered a technologically progressive "space age." Now in their dotage they realize that the "space age" ended 40 years ago and shows no signs of resumption despite the recurring "space porn" in Popular Science/Mechanics about sending astronauts to Mars.
