wnoise comments on Existential Risk - Less Wrong

28 Post author: lukeprog 15 November 2011 02:23PM

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Comment author: dlthomas 15 November 2011 07:21:55PM 1 point [-]

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.

Comment author: wnoise 15 November 2011 07:24:20PM 7 points [-]

The scale of curvature there makes it clear it's not 1 AU in radius.

Comment author: dlthomas 15 November 2011 07:33:56PM 1 point [-]

Fair enough, I suppose. But then it's not really a ring world so much as a... what? Space station?

Comment author: wnoise 15 November 2011 08:06:57PM 4 points [-]

Yeah, pretty much. If it were bigger, I might call it a Culture orbital.