If someone who is nowhere near an expert in a field tells you something can't be done...

本站添加: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]Welcome to Sacred Cow Shipyards, where no ship is safe from being taken down to its nuts and bolts.

[00:00:08]A few weeks ago, or possibly longer, depending on when I'm get around to posting this particular episode, an artist and author I had never heard of before, wrote the following tweet. And I want to stress for the record that these are his words and not mine.

[00:00:25]Those huge Halo/Ringworld/ O'Neal cylinder/rama/lesium habitats technobros like to fawn over are technically impossible. No known material has the tensile strength to support them. Best you can get will be a cowoon walled city in space. End quote.

[00:00:47]It's worth noting that this individual wrote a book called All Tomorrows that explores the speculative evolution of humanity as a species going forward from just a few years from now to billions of years. And I mean that would seem to put him in vaguely at least in the science fiction camp at least on occasion for me. And what's interesting is that he is far from the only science fiction or science fiction adjacent artist or author to be crapping all over the notion of humans going forth out into the cosmos. And yes, you heard that right. People who make their living convincing you that space is cool, whether it's pretty or whether it's fun to read about or whether it's whatever are trying to tell you that no, humanity is never going to go anywhere. Humanity is barely going to get off the planet.

[00:01:37]And maybe that's for the best. And on the one manipulator, I kind of have to wonder what kind of misanthropic compartmentalization is going on inside of that squishy mass that they presume to be thinking with that they would produce such interesting art on one side of the house and then crap all over the ideas driving that art on the other side of the house. I mean, in a just universe, that level of cognitive dissonance would be physically painful.

[00:02:04]But on the other manipulator, I am much more interested in talking about the most mottiest m and bailey I have ever seen bailey anywhere. And that is to say, putting Halo, Ringworld, and O'Neal cylinders into the same argument on the same side of the argument. Doing so simply exposes a ridiculous ignorance of the topic at hand. And let's talk about why. And actually, we're going to start in the middle with the aonomous ring world. Yes, the ring world is in fact the topic of the ring world book. I know you're shocked to hear that particular piece of news and is a mega structure in every definition of the word. In fact, it's kind of the first time that the concept of a ring world ever actually came up in fiction. It was written in 1970. And while the notion of spinning habitats to simulate gravity had been around since at least uh 1883 uh by way of Constantine Silkovski or perhaps 1920s thanks to Herman Oberth. Something this big had never really come up before. or rather something this big and this specific I suppose I should say because Nan himself actually described the ring world as the poor man's Dyson sphere and Freeman Dyson proposed the concept of a Dyson sphere in 1960 which was itself inspired by the book Star Maker written in 1937 by Olaf Stapleton in both cases whether we're talking about the star maker or the Dyson sphere that is an all-encompassing structure designed to capture energy from the star itself rather than a single band around the star, the ring around the star. And that's what makes ring worlds naturally distinct. And when I say the ring world is a mega structure, I I don't think you really comprehend just exactly how big I'm talking. It is literally a ring around a star at the same distance that your planet currently orbits your star.

[00:04:12]In other words, the ring has a diameter of approximately 306 million km, which naturally gives it a circumference somewhere in the range of 960 to 970 million km.

[00:04:26]The band itself is about 1.6 million km wide. That is to say, the distance from one edge of the structure to the other edge of the structure. and the the rim structure itself, the mountains at the rim to hold the atmosphere in because after all this thing is spinning in order to generate gravity, simulate gravity at least, those mountains are 1,600 km high. As a frame of reference, the tallest mountain on your planet right now is all of 8.85 km high. Yeah. And speaking of your planet, the surface area of the ring world itself, that is to say, the inside of the ring, the habitable area that does have approximately 1g gravity simulated again, it does have approximately sea level atmospheric pressure blah blah blah so on so forth. That whole area on the inside of the ring is equivalent to about 3 million Earths.

[00:05:27]In other words, no. You guys aren't building one of those anytime soon. If nothing else, it would require converting all of the mass in your solar system into building the ring world. In fact, that's pretty much how people figure the ring world itself was built, given that there are no other orbital bodies in the solar system with the ring world. On top of that, you have to develop a material called scrith, whose tensile strength is approximately equivalent to the strong nuclear force that literally holds atoms together. So yeah, the same force with which neutrons hold on to each other in the nucleus of your atoms. That's how hard scri holds onto itself.

[00:06:10]You guys don't really have anything in that category yet anywhere close. Not even in the ballpark. probably not even in the same galaxy yet. So, no, as the tweet pointed out, you are not building ring worlds anytime soon. But what about Halo installations?

[00:06:28]Well, they were inspired directly by the ring world itself, but unlike the ring world, they don't actually wrap around a star. They are much much smaller. So, that's much more doable, right?

[00:06:41]Well, maybe much much smaller is is relative here. They still run about 10,000 km in diameter. They're still about 318 km wide. And they still have a circumference of about 31,000 km. That's still pretty freaking huge. As a point of reference, your planet circumference is about 25,000 km. So, yes, you could technically fit a Halo installation around Earth. I I wouldn't recommend it, but it would technically be possible. In any case, the catch with the Halo rings is that they use artificial gravity in the Star Trek Star Wars sense. There are gravitic generators built into the rings. And well, guess what? You ain't got gravitic generators yet. Now granted, that is technically kind of one of those technological developments that tend to just accidentally happen with no forewarning or indication that it was coming. So maybe tomorrow you'll have gravitic generators and this will all be a moot point. In the meantime, you could technically rotate a Halo installation and simulate gravity that way, but you still basically can't build it. In order to get it up to a full 1g spin gravity, you'd be generating some notable centrifugal forces. And yeah, holding it together would technically strictly be possible. You do actually have the materials today to do it by way of carbon nano tubes primarily. But producing them on that scale in that fashion for that purpose is way beyond your capabilities right now. And even if you could produce them at that kind of scale, carbon nano tubes can only maintain that kind of tensile strength over a certain distance, which is realistically probably significantly less than the 32,000 km demanded out of the Halo installation. So yeah, on your way to developing gravidic generators, also find a new material that has more tensile strength than your strongest material today. Good luck. So yeah, ring worlds are out. Halo installations are out. Obviously, O'Neal cylinders are out too, right?

[00:08:49]Funny thing, no. See, the problem is this entire argument, like I said at the very beginning of this, was nothing more than a M and Bailey idiocy. In this case, the Mott, the safe defensible position, is that mega structures are basically impossible for you squishies to build at this point. And that's entirely accurate. The Bailey, however, is the inclusion of something like the O'Neal cylinders. The O'Neal cylinder is naturally named after Gerard K. O'Neal, who put the idea forward in his 1976 book, The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space. He wasn't quite the first person to come up with the idea like we talked about previously Herman Oberth proposed something similar and just three years before O'Neal's book Arthur C. Clark published rendevous with Rama which also included a habitable cylinder. But there's one big distinction for the O'Neal cylinders specifically. They were deliberately and intentionally designed and engineered to be entirely constructable using 1976 technology and materials. The only thing missing from the equation was simply money and will. And no, I'm not making that up. And that's primarily because the O'Neal cylinders aren't really mega structures. They're only about 8 km in diameter and about 32 km long. And that's it. None of this thousands nonsense of Ring World and Halo and all the rest. No, just 8 km and 32 km and bing, bang, boom, you're done. And even spinning that cylinder enough to simulate one gravity on the inside of the cylinder still doesn't require anything more complicated than steel cables. Now, Dr. O'Neal naturally complicated things a little, mostly because he recognized that lifting raw materials from Earth would be ridiculously expensive, especially in 1976. So, he hypothesized setting up a mining establishment on your moon and simply mass drivering the raw materials into place from the moon. But, we're still just talking aluminum alloys or steel or some sort of interesting composite, all of which you can make fairly reliably right now. Now, would it be cheap? Oh, hell no. Would you live to see it? Probably not. I mean, you don't have a mining operation on the moon right now. You don't have mass drivers on the moon right now. And you'd have to build the things to build the things to build the things that might eventually build the actual O'Neal cylinder. And most of that construction would have to happen in orbit or on the moon. And you don't exactly have industrial powerhouses up there yet, but still it is entirely doable using technology you had 50 orbits ago, which means it's totally doable now. So yeah, you've made it all the way to the end of this episode, which means it's a little late for a TLDDR, but all the same, don't let these backbirth crabs try to pull you back down into the bucket with them.

[00:11:56]It's clear they have no idea what they're talking about. And even discounting that wanted and clearly intentional ignorance, there's simply no reason to go along with the idiotic notion that humanity will never amount to anything in the stars. Y'all have accomplished great and amazing things in your history simply because they seemed like a good idea at the time. Whereas if your history was left in the hands of idiots like this one, you never would have left the safety of your caves. So yeah, go forth and build awesome things.

[00:12:28]Not only because they're awesome and not only because getting humanity off Earth is actually a really, really good idea, but also because it will piss off failures. And after all, spite is one of the foundational forces of the universe, so you might as well use it to your advantage.

[00:12:46]And that's all from Sacred Cow Shipyards. Please be advised that any ship left on the docks for more than 24 hours will be compressed to a cube at the owner's expense.

[00:12:58]Have a nice day.