Lizards and tits, lizards and tits, lizards and titsâŚ
Those are pretty sweet. And the Ringworld drawing would be a steal at that price. But I couldnât buy it because having to look at it every day would drive me mental and Iâll tell you why.
The ringworld in that drawing is a ringworld for ANTS! Itâs the same mistake on all the other Ringworld book covers Iâve seen (and at least one cover for Iain M Banksâs Consider Phlebas). What youâd actually see from near the surface, and Niven does describe this in the books, is the flat surface of the world receding like a highway into the haze, and a very thin arc of light going across the sky (the top of the arc would probably be too fine to see). For it to look like a ring while you were standing on it, itâd have to be, I dunno, no bigger than Rhode Island.
Leapinâ lizards!
Misread the title, thought it said, âPinup Action.â
Itâs really hard to wrap your head around the scale of the Ringworld. Itâs way beyond anything people have experience with. From the surface it looks like any other planet (unless youâre near the edge and can see the wall), just there is a thin bright line in the sky all of the time and the Sun is always directly overhead.
The surface area available is just crazy. The reason we will never build one isnât because itâs impossible, but because itâs gross overkill. Every person alive today could claim a land area approximately 230,000km^2, or roughly 1.5x the surface area of Earth, not counting the parts covered by water.
Itâs good if you want to get away from it all, you could literally have an entire planet to yourself.
Weasels Ripped My Wallet!
Is that Chevy Chase? Damn awful vacation, if you ask me.
But what good is an entire planet, if Iâm tormented by the knowledge that the other guy has one too? Half the fun of resource competition is artificial scarcity induced by the fact that people are lousy at settling for âenoughâ and tend to edge into âmore than the other guyâ or even âI hardly care, so long as that asshole gets nothingâ with alarming efficiencyâŚ
âHundreds matched in protest today over an OmniCorp lawyerâs decision to evict 43 tenants from their planet-zones.â
Itâs not too far off what youâd see if you could see clearly through several million kilometers of air, I think, which means itâs a decent âNASA artistâs conceptionâ of the Ringworldâintended to be as accurate as possible while still giving a clear impression of the thing-ness of it, by contrast with a blurry smear in a telescope. Technically itâs less accurate, but it gives a more accurate understanding of the Ringworldâs nature than the apparent âendless flat land beneath an archâ that keeps fooling the Ringworldâs more primitive inhabitants. Similarly, the sun wouldnât bloom and outline the shadow squares in vacuum, but depicting it that way shows you whatâs actually there instead of the illusion of real perception.
It also doesnât get relative scales as wildly wrong as some depictions do, e.g. no cities visible from a million miles out, no rim walls visible from the center. My main gripe is that the perspective on the shadow squares makes it look like thereâs a lot less of them than there are shadows on the RingâŚ
Sorry to prattle on, I just reread Throne and Children and itâs all fresh in my head.
It makes sense from the perspective of the race that built the Ringworld, who breed like rabbits and are intensely territorial. Once they developed nukes, âthis planet ainât big enough for the both of usâ wasnât a joke but an existential threat.
Youâre right that humans as we know them wouldnât need it, though.
(Leaving out about half a dozen paragraphs of spoilers and unnecessary nerd commentaryâŚ)
The backstory is the lizards are attacking the guy for manhandling the woman. One of the more judgemental lizards is scolding her âfor making bad choicesâ, as he puts it, but it seems to be more his own issues than any fault of the woman.
Thatâs how The Illuminati distract us, manâŚ
Eeeeh, a whole ring is too much for one feller. A Plateâll do, man. If you need me, send a message to GSV Ayn Randâs Dole Cheque. Weâve gone on a wander, but weâll get back to youâŚ
As a Fellow Lizard, he inevitably agrees that, when itâs inevitableâŚ
âGet your hands off me, you damn, dirty⌠iguana?â
More Ringworld scale talk:
If you went on a sightseeing tour on a fast bus traveling at 120kph all the way around the Ringworld, it would take 922 years to complete the trip, assuming you could drive all the way through without stopping for bathroom breaks.
If you instead took a SR-71 and had in-flight refueling stations setup all the way across, you could complete the trip in only 31.3 years.
If you were traveling as fast as the space shuttle did while in orbit, you could complete the trip in a little under 4 years.
For people living on the Ringworld, they would never see more than a tiny piece of if even if they were world travelers with a lifetime to explore. It would be interesting to see what would happen to human culture when land becomes effectively a limitless resource. Most conflict boils down to being unable to share some limited resource, but on the Ringworld there need not be limited resources.
