= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
dlthomas 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)
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?"
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.