Wonder of Ringworld

Ringworld is a 1970 science fiction novel by Larry Niven, and as far as I know he was the origin of the idea of a ringworld. It’s a compromise between a Dyson sphere and a planet, a ring of material surrounding a star that spins to simulate gravity via centrifugal force. The radius is that of an Earth-like planet which means the ring is six hundred million miles long, and almost invisibly thin at only one million miles.

I don’t want to get into the physics of the whole thing, but it does require only one invention that doesn’t work — a material strong enough to build it. The structural material would have to have properties thousands of times stronger than carbon fiber, steel, or any material even imagined by today’s physics, a material whose tensile strength was provided not by electromagnetism, but by the strong nuclear force. A material, in other words, that not only does not exist, but based on our current understanding of physics can’t actually exist.

Asked AI for “Larry Niven’s Ringworld”, and it returned this.

Terrible powerpoint where I try and fail to illustrate the sheer size of this thing. Imagine the map of Earth on the narrow lines at the top, it is far smaller than a single pixel, even if you’re at 8K resolution.

Here is another way to imagine the size. If you’re running your monitor at normal HD resolution, 1920x1080, that’s about two million pixels. So, take half of your screen — the left half, and color every pixel green. Then color one random pixel white. That one…