“Why not build the equator? Much cheaper.”
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Someone told me about dyson spheres in the mid-1970s. Maybe it was Poul Anderson. Freeman Dyson’s revolutionary construction had habitats and widgetry of any description about a star. The point was, earthly telescopes could find foreign lives by looking at certain stars.
I absorbed science fiction -author’s version: A Ping Pong ball as big as the Earth’s orbit, closed a sun and collected all its sunlight for industrial use. Colonized the inner surface.
I played with it. I had generated gravity general ratality that violates and fantasy-size funding. Without both you would turn it and only the equator would be used …
Why not build just the equator? Much cheaper. Spin on – I fudged numbers because this is not sun – 770 miles per second. In this size you could hold most of the atmosphere inside with 1000 km high wall, no roof. Leakage would be acceptable. Spread a landscape over the interior: 3 million times the earth’s area. Population: Greater than you would think because I made another association: the human race evolved elsewhere, in three stages, childhood, breeding and protecting (the adults). I had written about them elsewhere. Pak protectors are intelligent tool sancations; Breeders (Homo habilis) Isn’t it. Protecters built Ringworld … and built it and populated it with Homo habilis. Pack protectors are not ecoologists; They didn’t bring anything they didn’t like.
As breeders spread throughout the ring world, protectors were suddenly abandoned. I assumed a war killed them. Without protectors of abolishing them, breeders moved into dogs of organic niches. So if you assume a population of 100 million (for a primitive soil) times 3 million, you would be shorts. Mutation of breeders shaped to use ecologies that have been relocated by equivalent with bats, hyenas, lions, many predators and planters … Ghouls or night people are everywhere, Ringworld keeps clean and often civilized …
I was a beginner, a few years into a new career. These numbers were scary. Would I be laughed at the internship? New authors gave up the feeling of amazement as it was adopted. But an engineer had written that engineers are not afraid of large numbers.
The detail I added to Ringworld engineers Almost writes himself.
It’s always dinner. Lll must invent night.
The back of the ringworld is the mask on a planet. Seabed is always low and flat because people only use the top of an ocean. Fjord and ports are everywhere, for the convenience of boat people. Mountains show subtle stairs.
Ringworld‘S success pleases me. It won several awards. It also generated feedback – which also pleased me. Over the next 10 years I got enough feedback in letters and conversation with my own subsequent and elaborations to demand a successor: Ringworld engineers. And continuous feedback.
Ringworld is a fantastic creepy intellectual toy. Readers tend to continue playing with it after they finish the book. I APPRESS TOTALLY: A person must continue to think of a book; If they don they get their money worth.
A professor of England informed me that the ring world base would require the tensile strength of a nuclear nucleus. Otherwise, spin would tear it apart. (So ​​I invented scrithh. (I knew it; I added attitude rays in Ringworld engineers.) To the Florida High School Class spent a semester on Ringworld and decided that my worst problem was that soils were up at the bottom of the world seas. (Hard! I put a system of pipes in the seabeds, drove them edge and over the top of the edge walls and got spills and brand new races of hominids to occupy them.)
I wrote that protectors lose their sexual urge and sex characteristics and left a hard drive to protect their genetic line. A fan tip out that they are down a wonderful accurate sense of smell to feel unmuted descendants. Give them big noses! (I did.)
My shadow squares that bring night to the ring world needed work. There’s too much dusk, not enough evening. They have to be a lot of line, five of them, retrograde orbit!
Dan Alderson, a scientist at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, where he became known as “Sane Genius”, designed a system with the oven ring worlds. Three are orthogonal to each other and turn on friction -free rent. The fourth was built by mesklinites. Hal Clements Mesklin has tremendous gravity and extreme cold. Dan needed an orbital radius the size of Jupiter or Saturns and much higher speed.
Edward M. Lerner and I wrote five books that retrofitted my well -known space. I kept him away from Ringworld but my character Beowulf Shaeffer’s life because they are credible, and Ringworld‘S protagonist Louis Wu undertook more details.
Freeman Dyson thought it would all work better if it was less. At 1 million miles radius, by one-earth-thinpin spin would take 24 hours! Orbiting the sun would give it seasons! And thousands of such objects in the sun lane would include … a Dyson sphere.
I put the foreign kzinti in many stories. When James Patrick Baa invited me to open known space to other writers, I told him the known space was my. But as I donate that it writes war stories, he could publish the era of Mon-Kzin Wars (but stay away from Ringworld). We had 15 volumes of Mon-Kzin War stories, a few of which are mine before we closed it.
I have the foreign Pierson’s puppets such as paintings, statuettes, origami, pipe cleaners … and Bonnie Dalzell put a putter variation in Smithsonian.
There has been some feedback on Ringworld‘S Teela Brown, which was bred to luck. Her is the ultimate mental power – author control that teachers for writing say should never show – otherwise she is a statistical fluke. In a large enough population you bowl Find a person who has been constantly lucky. I never decided which one contains description. I had wu played the ever -optimistic doctor Pangloss (from Voltaire’s Sincere) Through all four Ringworld Books. Whatever happens to Teela, a reader can see it as the best of all sorts of worlds.
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