Anthony D. Baye wrote:
> Alain wrote:
> 
>> Anthony D. Baye nous apporta ses lumieres en ce 2005-10-12 20:50:
>>
>>> Mike Williams wrote:
>>>
>>>> Apart from the absence of the plasma tube, I'd say it was Thistledown.
>>>>
>>>> Where does your hollow asteroid get its light from?
>>>>
>>> Wow.  Someone else reads what I read.
>>>
>>> A.D.B.
>>>
>>> P.S. Alain,  Gravity is based on mass.  A sphere the size of earth's 
>>> orbit with a shell thick enough to withstand impacts would naturally 
>>> have a reasonable amount of gravity on it's inside surface.
>>
>>
>>
>> The gravitational pull from the relatively small but very near region 
>> under your feet is exactly countered by that of the extremely large 
>> and distant part over your head.
>> That leave you with ONLY the gravity from the sun witch is straight 
>> up... NOT a good thing.
>>
> Far be it from me to dislike being proved wrong.
> 
> but an interesting factoid:  Larry Niven's Ringworld, which was 
> conceived as an intermediate step toward a dyson sphere, spun at 770 
> mi/h.  It was determined that, in order to withstand the shearing forces 
> from the spin, the base material which measured 1000' thick would have 
> had to have had a tensile strength on the order of the force which holds 
> the nucleus of an atom together.
> 
> A.D.B.
Still, if it were spun up for gravitational effects, and only the area 
around the equator were used for habitation, and the rest was used for 
energy collection, storage, life support and suchlike, then there would 
still be a massive amount of livable area.  f/ex. if the sphere were the 
size of earth's orbit, and assuming that the livable area were a million 
miles wide,  then the total inside surface area (Not accounting for 
variations in topography) would be 2(pi)(9.28e6)(1e6) mi^2 that's 
several thousand times the surface area of earth.

A.D.B.

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