Re: Location, Location, Location!


Pat Flannery wrote:
Alex Terrell wrote:

If you have lots of colonies, its probably because their orbiting
something very big and useful, like an asteroid. A 10km asteroid weighs
1000 times an O'Niell cylinder. Hundred of cylinders could orbit around
it.


Yeah, but even with their far lower mass, they are still going to start
interacting with each other gravitationally.
What you've got here is the hundred body problem. When this happens to
planet's moons, the end result can look like this:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/da/Mimas_moon.jpg
You could maybe attach them together in a huge ring around the asteroid
via Fullerine cables, but then I believe you hit the Ringworld problem
as the asteroid can wander around inside the ring.

Pat


Wait a minute. Think of the incredible resources you must have if you
can make so many colonies possible in the first place. You seem to be
thinking "How many blind angels can dance on the head of a pin, without
bumping into each other?" here. But why insist on *blindfolded*
angels? Wouldn't the energy required to simply to manufacture the
cable in this conjectural cable network (which somehow has to tether
*spinning* bodies together) be better spent on propulsion for
station-keeping, if it came to that? A puff a day might keep the
collisions away. Where to get reaction mass? Well, the assumption is
that you're orbiting something almost inexhaustibly huge. So you've
got that.

It's only as complex as the 100-body problem if the bodies have nobody
at the helm, and no way to move themselves. Which I suppose could make
sense if you imagine that the inhabitants of all of the colonies have
descended into illiterate savagery, or nihilistic fatalism, with any
automated station-keeping backup systems having gone haywire. Not my
picture of the fate of the average space colony, but probably great
grist for the fiction mill for any Larry Niven heir-apparent.

-michael turner
www.transcendentalbloviation.blogspot.com

.

Relevant Pages

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