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[martys1103]

Read this first.
After reading this, do you think what I think? There are lots of unused stone below our legs, so...

[Girlinhat]

I'm personally fond of the "floating world" idea, which is much easier in Minecraft but also somewhat possible.  Google up "LeveL Webcomic" for an example, but it essentially involves building  a series of stilts, and a thick plate, upon which sits your city, abandoning the "under world" (the actual surface) as a garbage and sewage dump.  For full effect, you may try and mod in some form of soil planting, like the ability to take a stone, grind it into dust, and use that as soil, but that's beyond me, even though that -would- allow natural plant life topside.

[Minnakht]

Cast obsidian is a natural rock you can place anywhere. Turn your magma farms into actual farms if they're flat...

[Dutchling]

(reaction on that site)

I feel like the concept of "make it as thick as the earth to deal with gravity" suggests a lack of attention to high school physics.

Mass creates gravity, sure, but when we're not dealing with a nice, convenient, ball, you're going to have issues with exactly what direction gravity is pulling you. Hollow or not, you will be pulled towards the centre of mass. In the Dyson Sphere, that's the centre of the sun. With the disc it's a bit more of a complex math problem.

I think I have a new idea for my elf trap

[Masennus]

(reaction on that site)

I feel like the concept of "make it as thick as the earth to deal with gravity" suggests a lack of attention to high school physics.

Mass creates gravity, sure, but when we're not dealing with a nice, convenient, ball, you're going to have issues with exactly what direction gravity is pulling you. Hollow or not, you will be pulled towards the centre of mass. In the Dyson Sphere, that's the centre of the sun. With the disc it's a bit more of a complex math problem.

I think I have a new idea for my elf trap

The disk isn't actually more complex. The center of gravity is still at the sun.

[Girlinhat]

The idea of "make it as thick as the Earth" is flawed on so many levels.  Aside from the sheer amount of material involved, it would take several hundred solar systems to make a proper dyson sphere, perhaps a whole galaxy depending on how planet-heavy that galaxy is.  Dyson spheres are a good theory, but they fail in practicality because people don't understand the total enormous size of space.  The distance from the Earth to the Sun is so vastly enormous, that it's not measured in miles or kilometers, because it becomes impractical.  That means the leisurely walk from here to the sun is so vast, we had to think of new ways to visualize it.  Really, the only possible chance for even a ringworld, would be if we unlocked perpetual motion and also energy-to-matter conversion, or else energy-to-matter that was efficient enough to run on solar power, in which case it may or may not produce enough material before the sun run dry.

[*Poster*]

Erm, we could build ringworlds with individual planets.

[Girlinhat]

Not a proper ringworld, that is, a ring 1 AU distance from the sun making a solid band around the star.  Even paper thin, it would be too enormous to construct with conventional matter.  A lot of people over-estimate the abundance of mass, or rather they under-estimate the sheer size of space.  To make a small show of size, if you took all the asteroids in the asteroid belt, and pushed them together, their combined size would be smaller than the moon.

[Alkhemia]

there also the Ringworlds in halo there only 10,000 kilometers in diameter though but that would be more feasible 

The plot of the first-person shooter Halo for the Microsoft Xbox, Windows and Mac OS also takes place on an artificial ring structure. Given its dimensions (10,000 kilometers in diameter) it is more like Banks' Culture Orbitals (though much smaller) than Niven's behemoth. Similarities to Ringworld have been noted in the game,[10] and Niven was asked (but declined) to write the first novel based on the series.

from the wiki

[Girlinhat]

In a proper ringworld you wouldn't be able to actually see the curve.  Much like being difficult to see the curve of the earth from its surface, it would be several magnitudes more difficult to see the curve of a ringworld, given its immense size.

A Halo sized ringworld, would be economically un-viable, but structurally possible.

[Alkhemia]

A Halo sized ringworld, would be economically un-viable, but structurally possible.

Really?  I didn't think something like that would be structurally possible

[Girlinhat]

Well, with enough architectural research and the right alloys, most anything is possible.  Perhaps beyond the scope of modern engineering, but the amount of mass is within a reasonable limit (as long as we're talking about orbital constructions) and when in space, the requirements for engineering are much looser, given the lack of gravity and lack of undue stress.  Things can be tampered with using spin and shape to achieve things not possible on any planet.

[Urist Da Vinci]

Larry Niven's ringworld, the Halo installations, and Iain M. Banks' culture orbitals all required fictional materials with tensile strengths several thousand times larger than what we know exists in real life.

[Eoganachta]

I think that a ring world simular to a Halo world (ie 10, 000 km across. 1 AU is completely impractical) is possible but the real factors are technology, time, funds, and resourses. Water from Europa, rock from the moon, heavy metals from Mercery etc. It would take hundreds of years to build with a travel time stretching 6+ months trip between the earth and mars at the closest point. Also where you will build it is a problem as such a construction in earth orbit would affect tides and you run the risk of colliding with both the moon and earth (although this would be epic and truely dwarfy), so it would have to be built either near raw resourses or in the middle of nowhere. It wouldnt be able to move when it is being built as the energy required would be huge; even if all the nuclear warheads constructed by humanity were detenated in one spot (disregarding the fact that the planet would uninhabitable), it would only alter the earths orbit by a fraction of a fraction of a decimal of a percent. We have no method of changing where our planet goes except if we split it into two different bodies in which we could use momentum etc to change direction but this would not be good for our future well being. That or we could carve out a small planet or moon.
Gravity could be reproduced by having a rotational speed sufficent enough to create a centrufugel force although I dont see how you could have an atomsphere on the thing without it being flung off. I have no idea where we could get enough energy from to do all this but if we did do it, it'll be a megaproject spanning proboly our entire species.

[ZetaX]

I did a rough calculation and derived that earth's matter is enough to build a dyson sphere with a thickness of about 1cm around the sun at earth's orbit. Using the rest of the solar system (Jupiter) and building it nearer at the sun, some meters should be possible, enough to live in (theoretically, the climatic/thermodynamic aspect is another one).