It’s safe to say that there are MANY constraints that would make our being able to construct a ringworld almost impossible. Similarly, the main characters in Ringworld can only speculate as to why it exists in the first place, with no firm answers given or discovered throughout the novel.Ī ringworld would fall into the category of a theoretical “megastructure” - a very large, artificial structure which could not be constructed with today’s technology.
Based on the series in which Ringworld is a part (the Known Space universe), the method by which scrith is manufactured is completely left open-ended. There are no known materials like scrith in nature - or anything remotely as strong for that matter.
This alone places scrith in “unobtanium” territory as far as tropes in fiction goes. Scrith is used for the walls (1000 miles high) and floor (just 3300 feet thick - razor-thin when you consider the total size) of the ringworld. For example, scrith has a tensile strength (how resistant a material is to breaking under tension) comparable to the strong nuclear force, effectively making it almost impossible for it to break apart under its own weight or by other forces, such as gravity. In Niven’s novel, the core material that makes the construction of its ringworld a reality is scrith, described as “a milky-gray translucent, nearly frictionless material.” It has characteristics which allows it to perform many feats of engineering which would be impossible by our present-day standards. Need more help appreciating this? The video below might be enough to make your mind melt and leave you feeling very insignificant. Because this artificial world is so wide and orbits a sun-like star from about Earth’s orbit, there is a total of 300 million Earth’s worth of surface area. These numbers are daunting, but that’s nothing compared to what this all translates into when compared to the area of our Earth. In Ringworld, this construct is nearly a million miles wide and approximately has a diameter of Earth’s orbit: about 600 million miles in circumference. Coined by Larry Niven in his 1970 novel of the same name, a ringworld is an artificial structure designed to provide Earth-like living conditions around a star. The first target in my crosshairs is one of my favorite technological concepts: the ringworld.
Welcome to my “ Impossible” Technologies series, with "impossible” in quotations because although what you’ll find here will, in most cases, be considered solely possible in fiction, I’m here to determine just how fictitious these technological concepts are. Do you sometimes feel like there just isn’t enough space for the human population on Earth? What if there was a place where you could give each person on Earth an entire continent the size of North America all to themselves - and still have room to spare?
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