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'Megascale' structures that humans could one day build
- pmontra 6y agoThe second part of Neal Stephenson's Seveneves is filled with megastructures in space. I wish he made some videos to explain them better than with words. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seveneves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seveneves
- whoisburbansky 6y agoThis is something I’ve always appreciated about Greg Egan; his personal website is filled with pages and pages of exposition about the physics of the worlds he comes up with, down to the level of simulating what certain phenomena would look like and turning it into a video. Huge fan of the guy’s work.
- peteretep 6y agoBoth halves of Seveneves are crying out for TV adaptation
- nitrogen 6y agoThere's a fantastic amount of untapped cinematic material in the last 30 years of science fiction. Stephenson, Egan, Banks, ... Half-life...
- perardi 6y agoI have to think the budget, even with the megabudgets TV shows have today, would be tough to manage. There is a lot that takes place in zero G, and that is not cheap to fake.
- rtkwe 6y agoYou could do something similar to what the Expanse has done and have 'mag boots' so everyone just kind of walks around in zero g and they'll occasionally put someone walking on the 'ceiling' to sell the zero g.
- peteretep 6y agoI think you could probably figure out some decent excuse why most of the space stuff had gravity while leaving much of the plot intact
- lsllc 6y agoAll of Stephenson's books are crying out for TV or Movie adaptation! (hint: esp. Snowcrash & Zodiac!).
- peteretep 6y agoZodiac might make a better film, but actually I guess you can just transplant the protagonist into a variety of wacky adventures over a number of seasons. I think Snowcrash (like Cryptonomicon or Anathema) relies a bit too much on explanations for it to work on the screen. Diamond Age feels like it comes to too much of a conclusion, maybe it’s a mini series
- lsllc 6y agoI think the right director(s) could make Snowcrash work -- e.g. the Wachowskis'. They did a really good job adapting V for Vendetta from the original Alan Moore and David Lloyd comics/stories.
- strogonoff 6y agoReading Snow Crash and IMO it could be a fantastic series. However, I must say I would hate a poor adaptation much more than no adaptation at all. Hopefully in my lifetime someone takes it on and gets it right.
- yongjik 6y ago(Off-topic) I liked the first half of Seveneves, but the second half with megastructures... felt like a let-down, especially after the brilliant first half. The future civilization can hitch an entire city on a space elevator, but an aircraft pilot wears a catheter - because they somehow can't create an aircraft with a regular toilet. (I'm half convinced that Stephenson is aroused by future humanoids wearing cool technology and nothing else.)
- svachalek 6y agoI feel like Kurzgesagt does this so much better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pP44EPBMb8A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pP44EPBMb8A
- vlahmot 6y agoYou might find Isaac Arthur’s Megastructures playlist interesting: https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIIOUpOge0LtW77TNvgrWWu5OC3EOwqxQ https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIIOUpOge0LtW77TNvgrWWu...
- gnarbarian 6y agoMan, this guy has great content and I've tried to get past his speech impediment for literally years but I can't. It really taints his videos unfortunately.
- NortySpock 6y agoHis newer stuff has improved somewhat, he was working with a speech therapy group apparently in the last year or so. It's still not perfect but much better than it used to be.
- gnarbarian 6y agoThat's great news! I'll check out his newer videos.
- sxp 6y agoHe has closed captioning on all his videos to help viewers.
- mchusma 6y agoI think it's fine if you have an issue, but just so others no I have never had any issues understanding him, and he has gotten a lot better. Issac Arthur is a treasure, I wish high schoolers could take a semester of him.
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- sq_ 6y agoFar-fetched projects like the ones discussed in the article have always piqued my imagination. As the article semi-mentions, we may at some point be forced into geoengineering and other "megascale" projects (see [0] for superconducting rings to boost Earth's magnetic field as it flips). Maybe it's just overconfidence in humanity, but I can't help but believe that we are capable of such feats if sufficiently motivated and able to work together on the required scales. [0] http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2016/ph240/mclaughlin2/docs/NIFS-886.pdf http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2016/ph240/mclaughlin2/doc...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- aaron695 6y ago> If we consider megascale engineering that has actually happened – the terracing of parts of South East Asia, the land reclamation of the Netherlands, the US Interstate Highway System, the internet – it consists of projects that can be implemented piecemeal, where work can cease and resume after learning experiences, and where the system is not dependent on every part functioning perfectly. They can be maintained, and it usually makes sense for the people involved to maintain their homes and servers. This is a really good quote. Some estimates put Kowloon Walled City the most densely populated place ever. It's where I think seasteading has it's best chance. A contrary opinion would be Elon Musks Starlink or GPS.
- herendin2 6y agoThe Panama and Suez canals are also counter-examples. They were almost useless before they were completed
- dukeofdoom 6y agoAbout that Canon...Before the Iraq war, A Canadian Inventor was building a giant canon for them, possibly capable of shooting missiles at Israel and even the USA. After the war, he was assassinated by Mossad. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Bull https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Bull
- peteretep 6y agoIf you find yourself in Barbados you can go and visit Project HARP Space Gun. PS: only the Pope’s allowed to use the canon. Perhaps you meant cannon?
- dukeofdoom 6y agoHaha, yeah. I met the pope. But I'm the worse speller. Thanks, I'll definitely check it out if I visit Barbados one day.
- unchocked 6y agoHad a fixed aimpoint - Tel Aviv. Can't blame Mossad one bit.
- hydraxisb 6y agoDo you mean that Israel is justified to assassinate scientists which are or have been developing weapons that may or may have been used against Israel? Are you applying the same ethic to other nations?
- BelenusMordred 6y ago> Had a fixed aimpoint Source for that? See plenty about it being as a defense against Iran also. I can't find anything for your claim made. And I'd be very interested at where you draw the line for the extrajudicial murder of Western military scientists getting their face blown apart in a Belguim street by foreign governments? Hazarding a wild guess here but if an Iraqi intel agent did this to someone out the front of their house in Langley it would be completely immoral and evil right? Surely the justification you've made here can be applied to thousands of current and former government employees along with private contractors across the planet? I'm truly interested if you think this is how civilised societies should interact with each other? The man could have been arrested at any time, he was not in hiding nor unknown to world.
- HPsquared 6y agoA ginormous space-based sunshade for the Earth would be pretty useful.
- a3n 6y agoIt would be. Anything space based and big enough to rival or exceed planet sizes would take some very interesting engineering and management. They would take a long time. Technology would advance tremendously during their construction. In fact, their construction might be planned to never end. The first bits might not even be functional; their only purpose might be to act as a place to build the next bits on to. Even when we get to the functional bits, they might be designed and built to be replaced, or built over, like Mike Mulligan's steam shovel. They would also have to be designed and built to be safe even if civilization collapses. An interesting challenge would be to leave behind instructions, constantly updated while we're still around, to any future civilization to be able to "take up the tools" when they're ready.
- rsync 6y ago"Anything space based and big enough to rival or exceed planet sizes would take some very interesting engineering and management." Actually I think this would be quite small and manageable. A space shade shades more area as it moves further away from the Earth. Further, the percentage of solar energy we would want to mitigate would be relatively small. A modest sized shade made of reflective foil, in a solar orbit interior to the Earths orbit, could probably be done quite cheaply.
- austinl 6y agoWikipedia has some great content on megastructures. It's a good place to find some sci-fi book recommendations as well. I've ended up there more than once on late nights. Here are a few good starting points: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megastructure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megastructure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_engineering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_engineering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale
- dongobongo 6y agoNuclear detonations are very effective earth movers, perhaps capable tools in an Megascale structure project. See project plowshare. I'm not sure if the energy to make a weapon (enrichment primarily) is less than using conventional diggers and haulers. That is, are nuclear detonations efficient relative to other earth moving methods? Almost certainly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare
- ceejayoz 6y ago> Christoph Grienberger oversaw all mathematical works written by Jesuit authors, a role akin to an editor at a modern scientific journal. He was modest and productive, and could not resist solving problems. He reasoned that since a 1:10 gear could allow one person to lift 10 times as much as one unassisted, if one had 24 gears linked to a treadmill then one could lift the Earth… very slowly. Someone kinda did this; a 1 to 10^100 gear reduction. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFslB0AcVmM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFslB0AcVmM
- anomaloustho 6y agoIsaac Arthur also has a great series on Megastructures https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIIOUpOge0LtW77TNvgrWWu5OC3EOwqxQ https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIIOUpOge0LtW77TNvgrWWu5O...
- tony 6y agoAnyone remember SimCity 2000's arcologies? https://simcity.fandom.com/wiki/Arcology https://simcity.fandom.com/wiki/Arcology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcology
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- black6 6y agoOh yeah. Along the same lines I also have a fond place in my heart for Buckminster Fuller's tensegrity spheres.
- suyash 6y agoMost of the actual build and design will be done by robots and AI systems, humans will have a very little role to play.
- JohnJamesRambo 6y agoHow will the robots be powered perpetually?
- breck 6y agoRelatedly, there was just an infographic going around of "Megascale" spaceships from science-fiction movies: https://www.deviantart.com/dirkloechel/art/Size-Comparison-Science-Fiction-Spaceships-398790051 https://www.deviantart.com/dirkloechel/art/Size-Comparison-S...
- abricot 6y agoI'm a little sad that the webring on that page doesn't work.
- scythe 6y agoMy favorite candidate is the Chott el-Djerid. A canal to the Mediterranean would create a huge inland sea in a largely abandoned Tunisian desert. The resulting increase in precipitation could irrigate the northern half of the country, boosting Africa's youngest democracy.
- CoolGuySteve 6y ago> In 1920, the New York Times famously mocked the proponents of the idea [the rocket], implying that they lacked the physics education of a high-school student. (In 1969, the newspaper issued a light-hearted retraction a day after the Apollo 11 astronauts lifted off towards the Moon.) Is there any technological opinion people had in 1972 that would be considered embarrassing by today's standards? The only thing that comes to mind is that Simpsons quote: "I predict that within 10 years, computers will be twice as powerful, ten thousand times larger, and so expensive that only the 5 richest kings of Europe will own them"
- maxerickson 6y agoPeak oil. It'll obviously happen at some point, but they were very wrong about the timing. There's probably lots of examples on the optimistic side too. AI probably counts there.
- bryanlarsen 6y agoPeak oil will never happen. The Alberta and Venezuela tar sands contain hundreds of years of supply, yet in a decade or so it'll be cheaper to make oil using cheap renewable energy than it will be to pull it out of the tar sands.
- dumbfoundded 6y agoSo then we've already peaked? I thought peak oil referred to related to the rate of extraction, not the reserve levels.
- kodoque2 6y agoHow much barrel of oil do we need to get one barrel of oil from tar sands?
- forgingahead 6y agoPaul Krugman's prediction that the impact of the internet will be "no greater than that of the fax machine."[0] This is not by the way a specific criticism of Krugman (though I do think too many people, including Krugman himself, wrongly think his Nobel Prize for trade theory gives him expertise in every other subject he pontificates about). As usual, the non-doers (commenters or critics, places like the NYT) have little perspective on things that can change the world. It's up to us in tech to always have that bright-eyed optimism for what is possible, because we're the ones building it day-in-day-out. Observer critics don't really have a place in this, unless that criticism is coming directly from folks who are meant to be the initial customers/users of technology. [0]https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/revolutions/miscellany/paul-krugmans-poor-prediction https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/revolutions/miscellany/paul...
- gmuslera 6y agoFor some scale of structures, it may be too dangerous to be done here on Earth, at least in the short-middle term. Some systems are very complex and not well understood yet (climate, ecosystems, food chain, etc) and the risk of disrupting something we depend on and not have alternative place to live on if something unexpected happens. We are kind of living that scenario already, the global transport and energy "megastructures" are causing global warming, maybe not as construction but as system with many components. Imagine building something planned 100 years ago when the people of that time wasn't aware of the polar vortex, the gulf stream or positive reinforcement loops, or were not aware of their importance. Limited impact, controlled/limited side effects, composable for a planned/measured growth, instead of a big cathedral that must be all of it or nothing, may be factors that make some future projects be safe enough. It is not just being able to draw it and that have an sound math on its factibility. With big enough things, you may have to factor the impact for all of us, on things that are outside the construction itself.
- imtringued 6y agoIt is fair to consider a road network to be a megastructure. After all, the roads are all continuously connected to each other and if you were to sabotage some of the roads you can split the entire megastructure.
- fnord77 6y agowhen we reach Kardashev Type I civilization...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jackcosgrove 6y agoI have had two structures in mind for some time. One would be a solar powered water elevator that pumped water from the Pacific into the various endorheic basins in Nevada. These could then be drained during cloudy times or peak hours to supplement solar power. The other is a causeway along the Antilles islands from Miami to Trinidad that would act as an eastern connection point between north and south America.
- rtkwe 6y agoThat's so far why not use two closer bodies of water and just cycle it endlessly like the smaller scale pumped storage already being build?
- victop 6y agoThere is (was?) a project to do your first structure in the Atacama Desert in Chile: > Espejo de Tarapacá (EdT) – one of the most innovative infrastructure projects in the world – is comprised of a 300 MW pumped hydro storage plant that operates with seawater, located approximately 100 kilometers south of Iquique. This project is essentially a large electricity storage system which will eliminate, at a low cost, the intermittency of non-conventional renewable energy – such as solar energy. http://valhalla.cl/espejo-de-tarapaca/ http://valhalla.cl/espejo-de-tarapaca/
- m4rtink 6y agoI wonder if salinity and salt accumulation could become a problem in the upper body of water due to evaporation. But I guess you could get around it by monitoring and clever mixing.
- lxmorj 6y agoDon't forget you get 2.7% more mass per volume from the salt!
- mjklin 6y agoThere’s one in the mountains of Virginia too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_Sta...
- 01100011 6y agoI always wondered if it would be possible to run flexible pipelines floating close to the bottom of the ocean which could transport fresh water between far flung areas. Imagine if you could siphon some of the freshwater outflow of, say, the Columbia River and send it down to SoCal or AZ farmland.
- dumbfoundded 6y agoIt'd be easier to build and maintain a canal. If you're worried about evaporation, then just build a canal to the ocean and desalinate the water. It'd probably consume much less energy than a mega pipeline.
- etaioinshrdlu 6y agoCan we build deep into the Earth? Probably not... but it's funny to think about. The mantle is less than 4000 degrees C. Yet there are known materials with a melting point above that: https://www.asminternational.org/web/cmdnetwork/home/-/journal_content/56/10180/25655039/NEWS https://www.asminternational.org/web/cmdnetwork/home/-/journ... Even regular Tungsten would apparently get you through most of the mantle without melting. Alright, so what can be done about the extreme pressure that deep? It seems like bulk nanotubes are perhaps the only theoretical material that could withstand the pressure (100GPa)?
- elihu 6y ago> Alright, so what can be done about the extreme pressure that deep? Don't have any compressible gases. If we're just sending machines and infrastructure into the mantle, maybe that's possible. If we want to send people it's harder. I don't know if anything like the oxygenated fluid from the Abyss (or the LCL from Evangelion which was more or less the same thing) does or can exist in reality. Or if other problems would arise at extreme pressures. Your mention of high melting point materials makes me wonder if fiber optic cables could be made that survive in that environment. It'd be an expensive undertaking just to reduce, say, the network latency from North America to Asia. If we ignore the mantle, building into the shallow crust where it's still cool seems like a reasonable thing to do. I suspect the main reason it's usually not done are the cost of earth removal and reinforcement being higher than above-ground structures, and having to deal with water. It's fun to think about what an underground megastructure would be like, though. Could be as simple as turning an old pit mine or quarry into a below-ground urban center. In Portland, OR out towards Gresham there's a huge hole in the ground next to the Multnomah County land use planning department that I suppose is probably an old quarry. I like to imagine what it'd look like with apartment complexes along the sides and a park with a lake at the bottom. Maybe a shopping center with a farmer's market, and a light rail stop. Keeping it from flooding would be a huge logistical challenge, though.
- eloff 6y agoThere is something like that in China, a luxury hotel in a quarry: https://www.ihg.com/intercontinental/hotels/us/en/shanghai/shghe/hoteldetail https://www.ihg.com/intercontinental/hotels/us/en/shanghai/s...
- glenvdb 6y agoI've always thought that a practical use of mega-structures like Niven's Ringworld (or Halo from the video games), besides colonisation, would be to reach higher energy levels in particle physics, like with the LHC. To reach higher energy levels they need a larger circumference... so if you follow that research to extremes... maybe our descendants in the far future will live on what's essentially a massive science experiment.
- m4rtink 6y agoAn unlikely example of a rather unusual megastructure is in the manga/anime Aria: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aria_(manga) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aria_(manga) It is a slice of life story about a grouo of gonodoli riding turist guides in a replica Venice on terraformed Mars. You can see terraformed mars quite often in SF, that's not what I'm talking about. Not even the flying islands that hist the power sources keeping the planet warm. You see in tgis story, there is one thing kinda hiding in plain sight - it's terraformed Mars with Earth strength gravity. Yes, not 1/3 g but full 1 g and they did it during the terraforming, it's not a mistake by the author. So how exactly do you triplicate planets gravity withou importing 2 times of it's mass in the proccess ? By buikding a Mars spanning series of particle accelerators that accelerate dense macroscale objects to near lightspeed under the surface. Thanks to the theory of relativity things behave as they had much more mass as they approach lightspeed, which is exactly what you need to simulate two more Marses of mass needed to achieve 1 g like on Earth - bam, artificial gravity using known physics! :-) Just don't thing about the insane amount of energy requured to accelerate so much muss in your accelerator racetracks to lightspeed. Or what would happen if even just one of these superlaminar dense capsules anaged to collide with the accelerator wall, making all other crash as well. Very close supernova might seem like a firecracker in comparison.
- elihu 6y agoHuh, that's clever and terrifying.
- ars 6y agoYou would need to capture the ENTIRE energy output of the sun for about 5 years to generate that much energy. If you can do that, terraforming Mars is nothing, you could just grab a bunch of nearby asteroids or a planet or two and combine. And just think about how much material you need in order to build a collector large enough to entirely encompass the sun - it's WAY WAY WAY larger than your added Mars mass. Also you would need a magical strength material just to hold those lightspeed objects in place (think of the huge centrifugal force they are generating). There's nothing in the world that could hold them in place. I assume they are charged - or how are they keeping them in their "track"? No physical material could handle it. So they have to be charged, well the Synchrotron radiation generated would be enough to sterilize anything nearby. So "known physics" is a bit of a stretch.......... :)
- aetherson 6y agoI also appreciate the role-playing game settings of the author of this article. http://www.aleph.se/Nada/Game/BigIdeas/index.html http://www.aleph.se/Nada/Game/BigIdeas/index.html
- Crpt774 6y agoAll of that and not one mention of O'Neil cylinders? A bit less mega, perhaps, but more feasible than even a Dyson Swarm because of it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Neill_cylinder https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Neill_cylinder
- legulere 6y agoThe probably biggest current project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Sea–Dead_Sea_Water_Conveyance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Sea–Dead_Sea_Water_Conveya...
- croon 6y agoHere's a fun compilation of side-by-side renderings of smallest to largest fictional buildings (not only scifi). It really helps get a sense of the scale of the imagined structures. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjIci91FRX4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjIci91FRX4 Edit, starships, much larger than buildings above: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTPwbVqU6lc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTPwbVqU6lc No affiliation, but fun channel.