= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
gjm comments on Existential Risk - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (108)
Whilst I really, really like the last picture - it seems a little odd to include it in the article.
Isn't this meant to seem like a hard-nosed introduction to non-transhumanist/sci-fi people? And doesn't the picture sort of act against that - by being slightly sci-fi and weird?
Not only is the picture slightly sci-fi and weird, it's also wrong. I mean, my thought processes on seeing it went something like this: "Oh, hey, it's a ringworld. Presumably this is meant to hint at the glorious future that might be ahead of us if we don't get wiped out, and therefore the importance of not getting wiped ou ... no, wait a moment, it's kinda like a ringworld but it's really really really small. Much smaller than the earth. What the hell's the point of that?"
The picture is of a Stanford torus.
Don't those have to be fully enclosed?
Yes. The part that looks like a sky in the picture is some transparent material that holds the atmosphere in.
Faster build, reduced cost, not such heavy stresses placed on the materials.
I meant "what's the point of that, as opposed to not bothering?". Not "what's the point of that, as opposed to building a full-sized ringworld?".
Not much smaller than the earth at all!
With more physics and attention, one could produce better numbers, but as a crude ballpark (using data from wikipedia):
Surface area of the Earth: 510,072,000 km^2
Circumference of ring, if it's placed at 1 AU: 2 * pi AU = 939,951,956 km
So, if the ring is a little over a half a kilometer in width, it has the same surface area as the Earth - and could be smaller still, if we just compare habitable area.
The scale of curvature there makes it clear it's not 1 AU in radius.
Fair enough, I suppose. But then it's not really a ring world so much as a... what? Space station?
Yeah, pretty much. If it were bigger, I might call it a Culture orbital.