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

What?
Why was the link moderated, it was just a simple picture!!?
Arn't we allowed to post links?
I will load the picture onto my space.

What?
I can't even link it from My Space, its just a simple digramme of a dyson sphere (elipse), its only about 50K!!
Its just a elipse, a sun and a space backround! why was it moderated?
OK then:
The Dyson Egg:

........../~~~\ --- Solar cells/machinary
.........(-------)
.......(............)
......(.......*......) --- Axis of rotation with sun in midle
.......(............)
.........(-------)
..........\___/

the moderaters really are taking this too far.
we really should start the revolusion.
sorry thats not what this page is for.
2001 is a great movie, you just have to learn to aprecate suspense.
your right about the problem with the rama idea, i didn't think of that.
i think the idea of an egg would be better but it would still be a little weak. there really is no easy option.

The moderators are not taking this too far. They are following the rules. The rule is that no URLS can be put into conversations. At all. It doesn't matter what the content of them is.

WHY?
Why not disable the script that converts it to a link?
And why did they remove it from 'my space'?
They are acting a little weird.
----
I know an egg shape is not as strong as a sphere, but the gravition pull inwards is almost even all alround the egg.I think the main key to getting a stable dyson sphere is even gravtional pull inwards while having even central frugil force outwards.
(I think getting the two together is impossible, but an optimal balence is probably possible)

ok not just the moderators: the whole damn thing. why do we have to have all these new rules. we are adults are we not, we should be allowed to swear if we want to. we should be allowed to mention d***s without having our whole message removed. it doesn't make sense to me.
anyway i shouldn't be descusing that on this page.
the idea of an dyson oval does sound like quite a good one. if you spin it then not only will it push you onto the inside it will also try and push the insides away thereby pushing itself appart. if it was made to a big enough size then the fact that it is createing it's own gravity would help to hold it together and make it even more stable, instead of weakening it.

OK a link to the Dyson Egg diagramme is on My Space, they don't seem to have moderated it this time.
I would have done a nice 3D render, but I couldn't be bothered so its just a PSP pic.

We still have to solve the problem of how to stop the sun from drifting and eventually hitting the "egg". In our own solar system, the sun exerts an attraction on the earth which keeps it in a stable orbit (we hope). In the Dyson egg, the sun's attraction is evened out over the whole egg, so it does not force it to be in any particular place. The egg's attraction on the sun is likewise evened out so that there is no resultant force on the sun.

This "zero gravity" result, where there is no gravity inside the egg, is actually an assumption. It is true inside a hollow sphere, as was shown by Newton and is relatively easy to prove (1st Year University level Maths-Physics). I haven't done the same exercise for an egg (ellipsoid) yet. Does anybody else know?

it should still work inside an egg. if the sun was placed in the exact centre of the egg then the gravity from all the sides would be equal. the main problem i can see is what if the egg moved. would the sun move with it or would the zero gravity effect hold the sun in the same place. if it does then the sun would eventurally drift into the wall. in this case you would have to start the sun off on exactly the same orbit as the rest of the egg (if you wanted the egg to orbit anything) and you would have to watch out for anything, no matter how small, and make sure it didn't hit the eggs outter walls. the sightest change in direction would result in the sun eventurally hitting the wall.

The real question is not "whether or not the Apollo astronauts landed on the moon" - it is "when did they land on the moon?". In other words, was what people were watching on TV at the time really happening at that moment (was it live?). There is a straightforward way to figure this out, using all those nice photographs that NASA has supplied us with.

A complete lunar day is approx. 29.5 Earth days long - which makes "daylight" (the time at which direct sunlight is visible on the moon) last approx. 14.75 earth days. This means that on the moon, it takes almost 15 days for the sun to move from horizon to horizon. This also means that the sun appears "fixed" in the lunar sky to any humans that might be wandering about up there and taking pictures.

Find a picture of some preferably flat lunar terrain with some good shadows (from direct sunlight) of tall objects in it (US flags, people, alien artifacts, whatever). Do some simple trigonometry and figure out at what angle the light source is coming from.

Then, using the "date" of the said photographs, figure out where lunar daylight is supposed to be coming from on that particular date (This is the hard part). There are programs freely available on the Internet that might allow you to do this (with a little bit of effort). Your results may vary depending upon your math and planetary dynamics skills.

There are lots of reasons why NASA would want to pre-record the first few lunar landings. Perhaps they were faking it, and didn't give the important details to the lighting director. Or, more likely, it was due to the extreme risk of the missions themselves and the high stakes at hand. Remember the cold war? Remember public opinion and Apollo 13? Imagine if that was one of the earlier missions, and they DID NOT make it. Just some food for thought.

See if you watch the golf swing, the guy slices the shot.
This isn't possible without an atmosphere, or even to the extent shown in a thin atmosphere!

Merangadan

With Dyson Spheres, there would not be a problem with the sun moving about inside the sphere, as of course the sun itself would be holding the sphere in place. There would be no problem with gravity either as you would hope the sphere was spinning fast enough to compensate for the effects of the suns gravitational pull.

The real problems with the Dyson Sphere are of the enormous gravitational pressure on the sphere (a small amount of deviation in the structure would rip it apart) and the massive amounts of radiation and so on that the people on the inside of the sphere would be receiving.

I know this because I live in one. It is called Gooselandia and I am the king. Bow at my feet, peasants!

Goose.

Hmm...the whole point of my Dyson Egg is to conserve all forms of energy being emited from the star.
Any civilisation capable of building should be able to build radition shield, or 'vents' in the structure.
--
And I'm putting an end to moon consprance theroys by showing you this brillent page:
[URL removed by moderator]
Just add a 'h' and a 'l'

Nice try, Darkflame... Simplest method to do that is to make the URL the title of an otherwise blank entry, then post the link to the entry in a thread. If you feel energetic, you can put a live link as the entry body, but most people can copy and paste the title text from the page into the URL line of their browser... The whole process takes less time than it took me to type that explaination!

I had a similar problem in a discussion on a particular virus. The moderators followed the rules, as ever, to prevent me disseminating a URL for the dangerous and corrupting secret organisation known as Symantec. Whose website is so well concealed that nobody could hope to guess it, certainly not by prepending President Bush's middle initial repeated three times and appending the commercial top level domain.

i think it`s a good thing we have these so called conspiracy theorists. i mean do we really know what`s going on? someone mentioned the 160,000 people inolved in the moon landings but who but a few were actually involved with the landings? even the back up astronauts would have no way of knowing that their colleagues had gone to the moon. even as far back as the first world war siefried sassoon, who could be considered a proto conspiracy theorist was questioning the conduct of the war by saying that those who had the power to end it were prolonging, and what were the men in the trenches actually fighting for, the actual war aims being known to only a very few. so all i`m saying is that these so called conspiracy theorists keep governments on their toes by perhaps preventing them from trying anything to outlandish. or maybe when the whistle is blown they just hold their hands up and say how could you believe something that`s so obviously unlikely?

Maybe that's what they *want* you to think...

so where would it end?

i mean where i live there used to be a top secret research establishment just a couple of miles down the round and i didn`t have a clue as to what went on there. but i`m sure russian spy satelites flew over every 20 minutes and the kremlin new exactly what was happening there. what i mean is there are no real secrets if you go high up enough the chain of command or move in the right government circles. most questions can be answered with a simple yes or no. it`s just a matter of asking the right (or wrong) people the right (or wrong) questions!

I think this is right: centrifugal force wouldn't affect anything unless it was attached to the sphere (or whatever you want to call it) would it? It would just float around in the middle with the side rushing past. It might be that the fact of the sphere being self contained would be enough to 'attach' yourself to the outside. If so I retract my point. Just wondering. (Why couldn't I have become interested in something a little less complicated, brain surgery, for example...)