Bigger Than Worlds by Larry Niven

Author:Larry Niven [Niven, Larry]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Sci-Fi
Published: 2010-02-16T00:00:00+00:00

Dyson Spheres 2

I pointed out earlier that gravity generators look unlikely. We may never be able to build them at all. Do we really need to assume gravity generators on a Dyson sphere? There are at least two other solutions.

We can spin the Dyson sphere. It still picks up all the energy of the sun as planned; but the atmosphere collects around the equator, and the rest is in vacuum. We would do better to reshape the structure like a canister of movie film; it gives us greater structural strength. And we wind up with a closed Ringworld.

Or, we can live with the fact that we can't have gravity. According to the suggestion of Dan Aiderson, Ph.D., we can built two concentric spherical shells, the inner shell transparent, the outer transparent or opaque, at our whim. The biosphere is between the two shells.

It would be fun. We can build anything we like within the free fall environment. Buildings would be fragile as a butterfly. Left to themselves they would drift up against the inner shell, but a heavy thread would be enough to tether them against the sun's puny gravity. The only question is, can humanity stand long periods of free fall?

Hold it A Minute

Have you reached the point of vertigo? These structures are hard to hold in your bead. They're so flipping big It might help if I tell you that, though we can't begin to build any of these things, practically anyone can handle them mathematically. Any college freshman can prove that the gravitational attraction inside a spherical shell is zero. The stresses are easy to compute (and generally too strong for anything we make). The mathematics of a Ringworld are those of a suspension bridge with no-endpoints.

Okay, go on with whatever you were doing.

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