Outer Wilds feels
Looks nice until you realize it is full of Flood.
Ringworld!
I have that book somewhere. Nice illustrations.
The novel Neuromancer also prominently features an O’Neill Cylinder space station.
I remember that image from somewhere as a kid. Do you remember the name?
I don’t remember the image having a name, but it’s from Gerard Oneill’s book The High Frontier, Human Colonies in Space. - see OP’s link.
Looked like O’Neill’s work. That’s the same book O’Neill Cylinders are from
Thanks!
Reminds me of the Presidium from Mass Effect 1 and the Stranger from Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye.
Mass Effect is cool, but people need to play Outer Wilds.
It’s cool, but it would never look like that.
Maybe more valuable in the way it shows what we think the ideal situation on earth would look like…
Even for earth this is way too suburban imo. Does not make sense to have everyone spread out that way for multiple reasons.
Solarpunk development in my view should be as green as our suburbs today but much denser to save on cost, keep people connected, and save room for wild nature.
and save room for wild nature.
Arguably space habitat is the ultimate way to achieve that goal on earth :-)
Well, if you assume that the air recycling will be done by plants, you are going to have a need for a huge biosphere and probably for a lot of oceanic biome. If you plan on having an agriculture, if you plan on having pollinating insects, you are going to need a huge biomass.
You’re going to have far more nature than you will have humans.
This setting usually assumes that you have a fast transport network built in the core infrastructure. So being spread out is less of a problem, especially if you have free electricity through solar panel. That means that moving stuff around on electric motor is going to be basically free.
It makes a lot of sense in the “Elysium” sense. A rich resort getaway.
It wouldnt be all blue and nice sky either, because no atmosphere. Unless they tinted the glass blue I guess but even then you would either have a permanent night or permanent full on solar hyper radiation. Like how would lighting that even work?
You’d clearly have a roof/floor all over, and it would all be artificial light.
Oh, and levels. You’d get way more use out of the space by making sublevels. But maybe they have that in the picture it’s hard to say. Shit, all that dead space would be filled top to bottom of the torus, why leave all those precious cubics empty?
If would be DS9, not Rama.
Unless they tinted the glass blue I guess but even then you would either have a permanent night or permanent full on solar hyper radiation. Like how would lighting that even work?
Assuming the ring is orbiting the sun, you just tilt the ring a few degrees, depending on the width of the ring. At one point in it’s rotation, the sun would be nearly directly below your feet and your part of the ring would be unlighted. At such times, the opposite side of the ring would be in sunlight shining from behind/beneath you. That part of the ring would likely appear as a glowing ribbon across the night sky and provide light like the full moon does on Earth. As the ring rotates you to the day side, the sun would appear to rise from over the edge of the ring wall and shine down on your part of the ring. At noon, the sun would be over head, just a few degrees to one side of the opposite side of the ring, which would likely be invisible in the glare.
Needless to say, the ring base and glass would need to block the most harmful rays of sunlight for that to work.
There’d be a few levels, I think, but depending on the size of the structure you wouldn’t want too many as the ‘gravity’ would start to get noticeably different the further apart they go.
I mean, that make sense as a fantasy, but even quadrillionaires would struggle to make it happen, given the constraints of physics, I suspect…
Agree, for sure. Still, the dream of chill accessible green space is real and should not be ignored. I think low-medium rise, high density with lots of interspersed green spaces is the optimal for cities. I think it can be done such that most land is much greener and more connected than modern suburbs.
Yeah I think we are largely advocating for the same thing. Central business districts that are all concrete and glass are pretty dystopian. But medium dense cities with car infrastructure replaced by green space would be perfect.
Hahaha right? It’d be a few highrise metropolitan buildings and then mostly low income slum and there’d be thousands of cars and no parking spots.
In a space station I think it’d basically be all high-density pods with a few small shared green spaces for mental health…
Rendezvous with Rama
I still think O’Neill was probably right, we could do this if we decided we needed or wanted to bad enough. There’s issues to figure out, but that’s just science. I got hooked on the idea of space colonization when as a kid in the 70s reading an article in a National Geographic issue exploring the idea, using a fictional opener of someone writing back home about living on one. They used some of Davis’ works there.
100%.
The one thing global society lacks is direction. Shit even my dad told me that my whole life.
We’re like, let’s all compete about money and random great things will or might happen as a by-product.
Bitch we need to figure out what we want to do and do that, not just wing it and hope for the best.
I think the issue for space colonization is there’s no real practical reason to do it beyond that it’s cool and interesting. There’s still absolutely tons of largely unused land in deserts, polar climates, and even the ocean that are far more accessible and habitable than space is.
Cool and interesting seems like two amazing reasons to do it.
I hate that we live under a mental paradigm that the only thing that matters is efficiency, ad infinitum and ad nauseam.
Shit, the nazis were super efficient, doesn’t mean they had a good thing going.
I hate that we live under a mental paradigm that the only thing that matters is efficiency, ad infinitum and ad nauseam.
Take one more step, and you’ve got it. Efficiency only matters because it maximizes PROFIT, and Profit is all that matters. We are Ferengi, at our core.
So the reason to do it is because uncontrolled, unregulated profit-gouging has made the Earth literally unliveable. We haven’t reached that point yet, but we are certainly on that path, and those who would protect us from the inevitable outcome, won’t even acknowledge that the problem exists, calling it a hoax, and even forcing their alternative hoax to be governmental dogma.
It seems like those who control the money have already decided that this is our future, so it’s perfectly acceptable to destroy this environment, in order to create enough profit to build the next environment, which will be reserved for the Sociopathic Oligarchs.
Also, it could travel to find distant worlds to colonise
(It’d have to accelerate slooooowly though)
Due to low gravity and few pathogens, it might be something people will do for retirement. You can probably expand the time of healthy active years well into your 80/90ties that way.
Maybe… or would your body simply rot away faster since you aren’t using it as much? I would be inclined to think the latter.
I suspect they’d need to do some power lifting to avoid accelerated osteoporosis in the lower gravity, as the bones do indeed require to be put under strain and shock to stay healthy.
Depends on how active you are and how low the gravity is. A lower gravity like on Mars would be probably be more helpful than harmful for elderly people.
Thank god that isn’t a thing on Earth…
However bad it is here I’m sure it would be much worse in space, considering astronauts have all their muscles atrophy even with a pretty intense workout regime.
Everybody will just move around on hover-recliners, like in Wall-E.
Even with the technological issues of space colonization solved, how long before the unsolved social issues cause it to come crashing down?
Given the way society is currently set up, if we pursue space colonization then it’ll become a luxury for billionaires to escape an unlivable planet. Worse, the hoards of the capital will have even less desires to fix things.
(This is not some doomer or accelerationist take, just hating on billionaires.)
This is my assumption about what’s likely to occur as well. And a song about it: King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard - Mars for the Rich
If we could agree on such a great project and make it happen, that would have a massive benefit for our overcoming the very problem you are talking about.
If we could just agree to do something great together then that in itself would solve a lot of social ills.
Cooperation, not competition. That is the key.
Great, that covers the first generation in charge. What are the long term educational, economic, political, social, and cultural institutions that will keep things going when everyone alive will have been born on the ship/station, and nobody has first hand knowledge of how it started?
That has a strong Minecraft vibe
Your mind went to Minecraft first before Halo? Huh.
Mine went to
Tap for spoiler
outer wilds
😁
I don’t remember a ring world in the outer wilds. Maybe a slight similarity to the twin hourglass plants.
It’s in the DLC, but frankly it wasn’t that good imo. The base game was easily top 10 games I ever played, the DLC I didn’t even finish.
I always meant to buy the dlc. Was wondering how they would even incorporate new stuff as the original is just one long puzzle. Good to know i didn’t miss much. Maybe I’ll catch it on good deal one day. I did very much enjoy the base game. That ending lives rent free in my head. Falling through the nothing was a tripp.
Personally i really enjoyed the outer wilds DLC and would really recommend it, yea it’s not quite as good as the base game but it’s like a self contained puzzle world that is still clearly made in the same style as the base game and if you want more of that type of puzzling you can’t really go wrong with it imho.
Yeah but that self contained is just what makes it feel confined to me, I’m missing the “there’s a whole interconnected world to explore” vibe of the base game.
It’s not bad by any means though, maybe I shouldn’t have played them in succession and left a break instead.
Yeah I don’t regret buying it to sponsor the devs, but I missed the “one long interconnected puzzle” aspect. It does feel a little tacked on afterwards (because of course, it can’t be any other way).
It’s not bad, it just feels too confined to me after playing the open world base game.
In that it is completely unrealistic and defies physics?
In what way? I think usually these sort of designs rely on using some as yet undiscovered super strength material to hold them together. Other than that they are just a big Engineering problem. The Physics is sound.
The colours
Less depressing version of Zone of the Enders be like
I mean unless you’re the lucky one who gets to find Jehuty…
