Re: Interesting concultural ideas

John Cowan wrote:
>
>Andreas Johansson wrote:
>
>
>>That last would seem a very minor detail (except how the heck do you clean
>>an Oort cloud?). Besides, at least on our solar system, the planets are
>>mostly made of hydrogen and helium, which are hardly useable as
>>construction
>>material, unless you transmute the stuff into carbon or something.
>
>
>Maybe so.  IIRC, Niven says the Ring was made with the metals
>in the system, and the H and He were used as fusion fuel and
>working mass when spinning it up to speed.
I do hope he meant "metal" in the astrophysicist sense (which's "any element
except for hydrogen and helium"), since metals in the chemical sense make up
an even tinier fraction of the planetary material. Tho', of course, the
original system may've had much more heavy elements than the Sun's (which in
turn suggests that it's younger or much closer to the galactiv core than is
the Sun).

                                                 Andreas

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