Re: Planets and Moons

Geoff Horswood scripsit:

> What's always puzzled me is what you would do with the Earth's biosphere
> while you were constructing this outsized beach-ball, and whether it
> wouldn't be too fragile to survive more than a couple of hundred years,
> which would seem a bit of a waste, having gone to all that effort.
Dyson originally used the term "sphere" in the astronomical sense,
a collection of small objects uniformly distributed around the Sun.
A single rigid spherical body would indeed need to be made of unreasonably
strong materials.

There are many alternatives to the classical Dyson sphere: the Ringworld,
which is essentially the equatorial part of a Dyson sphere spun up for
gravity (the Dyson sphere itself, despite its mass, exerts no net gravity
on objects inside it); the cylinder, rotating on its long axis and wrapped
around the sun arbitrarily many times; and even the galaxy-sized Dyson
sphere, made by using the material in the spiral arms to construct a
sphere around the galactic core.

--
John Cowan  jcowan@reutershealth.com  www.reutershealth.com  www.ccil.org/~cowan
Promises become binding when there is a meeting of the minds and consideration
is exchanged. So it was at King's Bench in common law England; so it was
under the common law in the American colonies; so it was through more than
two centuries of jurisprudence in this country; and so it is today.
       --Specht v. Netscape