h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Apropos to nothing, I just found a cool clip about the home life of the Daleks... http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/retro/vault/q/realmedia/q4.ram

so you could probally make it work if you spin it fast enough and put up with the variation in gravity. sounds like a brillent idea. when do we start building?

Well, I've got no plans for the weekend...

great. now all we need is a large sum of money and, probally more material than there is in the earth. it just seems too easy.

Hey, if we call ourselves teh dyson sphere opera we coudl get lottery money.

There's the sponsorship option; we could build 47 of them, paint numbers on the outside, then put them in erratic orbits round a black hole - "The Galactic Lottery Draw"...

If you make it about one metre thick, it will certainly take more material than there is in the Earth, but there should be enough in Jupiter to do the job. Any who needs Jupiter anyway? Arthur Clarke didn't hesitate to set the torch to it in "2010".

But if we put it around our sun, the optimal radius is the same as that of the Earth's orbit. So where will we put the Earth while we're building it?

perhaps we can build it further out into space, beyond plutos orbit for example. there's plenty of room out there. bit of a problem using jupiter though. it seems a kind of dangerous place to try and steel matearial from. in 2010 it wasn't man who put jupiter to the torch.

True, and as a punishment for meddling in tehir jupiter plans teh monolith people (ig elbowed martians if you ask me) might make us sit trhough 2001. Nightmare.

Oh gravitys easy, as long as the dyson sphere is spining at the right speed, Central-fugily force would keep everying stuck to the inside.
How thick would the dyson sphere be anyway? The one in ST:TNG was thiner then the enterprise, yet it seemed to have water and landmass on the inside.

To expaned my previous point,
Gravity would only be a probably at the poles.(as previously mention).
But to compansate for CF diffrances the 'Sphere' could be a more elipical shape.

How about a Dyson "Drum", with a bit of glowing superstring substituting for a sun along the axis of rotation?

I can't think how that wouldn't work actually, physics could be a problem but I don't know enough physics to say that with any conviction. I think a spher elooks cooler but teh drum has the flatter advantage.

has anyone read rendezvous with rama by arthur c clarke? rama is a large cylinder that spins with an entier world on the inside. i think this would be a better idea than a spining sphere as the gravity would be constent around the whole of the inside instead of varing as you go towards the poles.
p.s. what's wrong with sitting through 2001. personally i would quite like to see it again as i haven't seen it in so long.

The cylinder in Rendezvous with Rama was about 60 kilometres long, I think. A cylinder would work very well at this scale. The book explained all the details, including the effects of acceleration on the internal sea - Rama was a spaceship with propulsion.

A cylinder built on the scale of a Dyson sphere, with a star inside for heat and light, would be a different proposition. With a proposed radius of 150 million kilometres, there would be enough mass to have a small amount of gravity. The cylinder might collapse under its own weight, while a sphere would support itself.

Larry Niven pointed out that with a very long very thin cylinder, you could spin the cylinder to provide simulated gravity, but due to the length, you could bend the whole thing around into any shape you liked without affecting the spin. He called this "cosmic spaghetti", although "cosmic macaroni" would be more accurate.

That's where the spinning would come in - the "centrifugial force" would act to prevent collapse...

No, unfortunately, there would be gravity towards the central point of the cylinder. At the ends of the cylinder, this would act at an angle to the surface of the drum. It would be small compared with the centrifugal "force" but would cause stresses in the drum which might be enough to collapse it unless it was quite thick.

An egg shape would be better, you would get gravity covering most of the serface, and it would be stablar then a tube.
Also you would begetting 99.99% of the enrgy from the sun, a tube would waste a large proportion of it.
For a picture of my idea:
[URL removed by moderator]

Thanks moderation, I'll ahve to remain ignorant.

And whats wrong withs itting through 2001? Its three hours of your life you could use better. Face it, teh film is Dull, teh bit with HAL is good but teh rest is just tedious, and teh ending is like being teh only sober one at a party. If you want to spend many hours watching a film, watch Das Boot, its really good.

But we digress.

I disagree, I was forced to watch many segments of Das Boot, and none of them made me wist to see any more.

For three hours of movie delight, I recommend "The Seven Samurai" by Akira Kurosawa. If it was in English, it'd be my favourite film of all time, but even subtitled I enjoy watching it every time it's on TV...