Posted on 03/18/2012 7:30:40 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
Heh heh... yeah, that would have been great.
The mass needed for a Dyson sphere *may* be present in the Solar System (though I doubt it), but if a lot of that mass is gas or water (which isn’t unlikely, considering the gas giants are very low density, and Jupiter is more than half the mass of the known satellites of the Sun), even assuming energy exists to gather it all to an orbit untroubled by existing bodies (such as the Earth, which we’ll need in the meantime), there just isn’t enough material. Larry Niven’s estimate of the mass needed to build just his ringworld was equal to Jupiter, and its orbit radius is 1 AU.
Thanks Bobalu.
;’)
Is that image hosting site easy to use, like TinyPic used to be?
http://larryniven.wikia.com/wiki/Ringworld
[snip] In Ringworld’s Children it is additionally explained that it took the reaction mass of roughly 20 Jupiter masses to spin up the ring; thus the combined mass of the planets of the original system was that much larger than our solar system’s. [/snip]
Heh... or maybe they’re just big “Open” signs for some kind of space biz.
I fermi believe that you’re kidding about not understanding.
Hey, we could have told them that. :’)
A lot of these guys are living in the realm of science fiction, I think. Not that I am opposed to science fiction, but don’t confuse it with real science.
“How do you fight against THAT?”
Easy. There is nothing here worth the bother of interstellar travel, ergo nothing to fight.
“How do you fight against THAT?”
Easy. There is nothing here worth the bother of interstellar travel, ergo nothing to fight.
This is the realm of real science, but it’s not necessarily the realm of dismal science — iow, economics is the only place where “all is number” really makes sense.
Mostly
or perhaps a Ringworld?
ZPE?
I recalled where I read that about red giants being dyson spheres, it was John C. Wright talking about big hooks for his new sci-fi book. I think he also said things like huge sources of x-ray and other radiation, black holes and novae were actually artificial. And that it never occured to anyone that some folks would think it was natural, and devolop ridiculous scientific theories about what was actually intelligent manipulation upon a huge and slow scale, like wars and signal beacons but on a galactic scale and time frame. Like the reverse of Fermi, the evidence is everywhere one looks almost, it’s just so big and slow we can’t even see it for what it actually is, because we have a hard time imagining something so big and on such a slow time frame could be anything besides nature working.
Freegards
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