Explanations of massive futuristic constructions

Cafe Society
1

In a thread on UFOs, someone mentioned a mothership half the size of th moon. And I thought of this while watching Dune, where they had all of these massive constructions - both on planets and in space. What movies, books do the best jobs of discussing the massive resources that would be required to build these humongous structures? Are we to assume that the construction took place over centuries/millenia?

Wouldn’t they basically have to cannibalize entire planets in order to obtain the material needed to construct something planet-sized. And then refine/transport/assemble all of that?

2

Just for the hell of it(no answer to the OP).

A number of videos comparing (in this case) fictional spacecraft from different sources,

3

Yeah - seen those before. Entertaining.

4

Larry Niven’s Ringworld used all of the planets of at least one solar system in its construction.

5

The things are Big Dumb Objects.

6

The most famous Big Dumb Object in movies is probably the Death Star (and the Death Star 2, which was a similar size).

The largest Big Dumb Object I can remember on TV is the Dyson Sphere in the Star Trek episode ‘Relics’. A number of other large objects have appeared in that franchise since. And some people may be familiar with the Halo franchise, and their eponymous rings.

All these large objects need massive amounts of material to construct, and this would take a long time, although the construction time could be reduced if the builders use some sort of automated exponentiating construction swarm; this is often implied (if not described in detail).

7

I have not read the series, but Greg Bear’s novel Eon features a fictional internally-terraformed version of the real-life asteroid Juno (very roughly a 155-mile diameter spherical object), called ‘Thistledown’ in the book among other names. I don’t know how well Bear explains Thistledown’s construction in subsequent novels, though.

8

Nanoid robotics for the construction.

9

To answer your question, we have to answer this question first. At what size does size go from being an advantage to being a disadvantage? If I build a ship half the size of the moon and something goes catastrophically wrong with it, I’ve lost half a planet’s worth of people. It kind of illustrates the old adage, “Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket.”

Also, there is the massive challenge of organizing and running a ship of that immense size. Newton’s laws of motion become a nightmare when you are trying to start up or slow down something with a mass that immense. I prefer the model where you would have a fleet of large but manageable ships. Also, you could try to reach several promising locations because your people are diversified whereas, with a single immense ship, you are committed to one location. If it doesn’t pan out, you are SOL.

10

The answer to the question varies immensely by the author and vagaries of the sci-fi techs used in the construction of such objects.

@enipla is correct, that a large number of more modern stories involve construction by self-replicating machines, nano or larger scale. Others use similarly gigantic fabricators, that take it raw resources and produce whatever is needed, including being able to replicate their own systems given sufficient time, resources and templates (same thing as nanoswarm writ large!).

The Dune universe is much more of an outlier though - most fiction considers an ever expanding frontier, modeled after early 20th century expansion and technological advancement. Dune’s universe is largely staid and stable, with most powers involved in keeping it that way (one of the many reasons for Leto II’s Golden Path). Travel, not just interstellar travel is limited, constrained, and EXPENSIVE even for the ruling class and Emperor. The aristocratic trappings encourage investment in long lasting, multi-generational resources, and a huge underclass on many planets are a simple source of labor.

And that leaves out the terror of self-controlled machines that is core to those stories. :slight_smile:

The main innovators in the core novels are Ix, who are looked upon by great suspicion by most in the Empire, and if you look at the prequel novels, it goes into much more detail. They are a technocratic-ruled planet, with a huge underclass of (claimed) sub-humans who do all the work. In the era when Duke Leto I was young, they were involved in building a next generation highliner guild-ship which became part of an effort to unseat them due to infringing on the jihad (leaving anything else out for spoilers) - but they were building it in a giant (!) underground cavern, supported by the existing anti-grav techs, with the intent being for a Navigator to fold it out.

11

Thanks, all. And keep the answers coming. I’ll spend some time with the linked material and (likely) books.

When we watched Dune (which we thought exceedingly slow), my wife kept commenting on the all of the huge ceremonial-sized spaces. Who built them? What were they used for?

Other than spice, there was no evidence of anything being manufactured, and no shots of industry other than one shipyard. Shortly after watching it, we drove through Birmingham, AL. As we passed miles of industrial areas, my wife commented, “THIS is what production needed to support a society looks like.” But, I imagine it is similar to the fact that so much of literature/film doesn’t show people using - not to mention cleaning - their bathrooms…

12

It calls to mind one of the don’t-bother Ringworld sequels, where the entire Ring together with its sun is turned into a hyperspace-capable ship. Which gets really silly when you realize that it already is 99% of all possible destinations.

And no, it wasn’t necessary for the Ring to escape the Core Explosion: it’s already established in the first novel that the Ring is oriented with the galactic core in its plane, and the material it’s made from is more than adequate as radiation shielding, even against the Core Explosion.

13

Isn’t that the story where the Russians called it “Potato” instead of Thistledown?

Iirc in the story, there is a naked singularity in the center and the inside of Thistledown is bigger than its outside. I don’t remember the method of construction being discussed much beyond “Humanity in the future did it and when they created the naked singularity it caused the asteriod to be flung back in time”

14

Yes, exactly that story. You’re correct about the Russian name for the asteroid/craft.

15

As much as I like Ringworld (and think it would make a great movie not unlike the first Jurassic park) Niven did a lot of handwaving.

Fer instance, I was driving through the backcountry of Utah yesterday, and I started thinking about Ringworld (yeah I know! geek life is a hard life) I’m looking at all the canyons, rivers, streams, washes, hills mountains, etc, and thinking, “You know, the Map of Earth in Ringworld is an exact copy of earth at the time the Ring was built. Someone scanned all this, and replicated it, in I assume, complete and accurate detail.” Because why bother making a Map of Earth (and Mars, and Kzin, and all the others) if they aren’t going to be accurate.

Now think that the builders have to make the rest of the structure, a million times as large, in the same level of detail. Since the terrain is molded in scrith, there’s no erosion, no shaping. What you build is what you get forever. That’s a lot of detail!

I assure you, you can’t built that with “hand labor”. No one, no billion someones, are out there in little worker bee ships, hand assembling scrith panels, laying the superconducting grid, carving rock, hauling dirt and water by the moonload. Stringing hundreds of millions of miles of shadow square wire, holding the shadow squares straight while they are installed.

Has to be all robots, with the scrith being formed in place by some sort of replicator tech. Millions of miles of construction a day. Otherwise it would take so long to build that whatever catastrophe that required the entire race’s resources to build…would be long gone and everyone would have died. As they say, you don’t build a megastructure because you want to, but because you have to.

And then Niven put in the sequel that Pak Protectors made it, which makes absolutely no sense at all. And since they don’t use automation, that means that yea a million protectors flying little worker bee ships was required to build it. I don’t think so. No one is out there in giant smelters melting asteroids and feeding them into giant scrith mills, pumping out scrith sheets waiting to be welded together or whatever you use to form scrith.

16

And transmuted them into some substance with a tensile strength approaching that of the nuclear strong force. How that could be manufactured, much less spun up to the enormous angular velocity the structure must have is unknown but should be far beyond the technology of the Pak.

Certainly some kind of automated construction would be required but ‘nanobots’ seem unlikely just because the energy scale would be prohibitive; to wit, nanobots work well on the scale of large molecules but the ability to make really large constructs would demand a continuous stream of power at the threshold of what a nanobot could utilize. At a certain point you give up on separate nanoscale constructors and you’d really just need to move to self-assembling structures, which is about a half-step away from synthetic life. Practically speaking, to construct truly massive structures you’d want to create some kind of synthetic ecosystem capable of utilizing a wide variety of elements and energy sources to ‘grow’ a structure of that scale.

Actually I think the Ringworld is actually problematic as a setting for a movie-length narrative and maybe not even that great for a series length. The first Ringworld novel was really an exercise in worldbuilding (both literally the Ringworld and figuratively in the Puppeteer breeding program that produced Teela Brown) upon which a pretty thin plot was hung. The problems with these kinds of exotic worlds is that it is difficult to make a compelling story and characters that aren’t overwhelmed by the world itself, especially when they have to spend so much time expositing about the world (as Niven does in the novel). The scale of the Ringworld also makes it difficult to do anything of real significance; Niven tried to do this in The Ringworld Engineers by putting the entire structure in peril (and acknowledging the essential flaws from the first novel) but frankly putting any thought into the story opens up more questions than it answers, which then required another novel of even less plausibility, ad nauseam.

The Ringworld is an enormous but very tangible “Big Dumb Object” that is really beyond the scale of any individual story. Science fiction works best when it focuses on detailed hypothetical constructs on a smaller, personal scale and large concepts on a broad, abstract scale. The Ringworld is in the in-between condition that isn’t really small enough to relate to but not big enough conceptually to explore philosophical concepts; it’s just a big spinning ring in space that is so large that it would take a lifetime to explore even a small section of it.

Stranger

17

Like I noted, this is the description of Jurassic Park. What’s the plot of JP? Explore giant new strange world, people get in trouble, escape. Oh, and look at pretty cgi dinos.

What is the plot of Ringworld? Explore giant new strange world, people get in trouble, escape. Oh and look at pretty cgi scenery.*

I would watch the movie just to see the cgi ring towering overhead, if they kept the book “plot”. You can even eliminate stuff. No one needs to know about Known Space, Pak Protectors, the differences between GP hulls or even Quantum II hyperdrive to tell the story. A wee bit of Basil Exposition about Kzin and Puppeteers and you’re good to go. You might even be able to eliminate all the stuff about the Birthright lottery and Puppeteer breeding plans and still make a coherent movie. The fan boys would wail, of course, maybe I would, too, depending on the depths of the incisions. Not everyone in the fandom, or I assume inside the Known Space universe, believe the “breeding for luck” actually works, even in the context of a universe where psychic powers are real. Teela did die after all.

eta: * that’s also the core of Rendezvous with Rama. Another thin-on-story book that would make a pretty movie.

18

Yeah, I don’t say this about many stories, but the way to make a Ringworld movie would to basically ignore the plot and characters, and just focus entirely on the spectacle. Which is something that Hollywood is good at, when they set their minds to it.

19

With all the talk about Ringworld and big dumb objects, and even escaping the galactic core explosion, I’m intrigued that nobody’s mentioned the Puppeteers’ homeworlds. They like their homeworlds, and rather than evacuting them, they found a way to maneuver them into a mutual-orbiting “rosette” of planets (IIRC, 5 of them) and accelerate the combined cluster to move at a speed and direction sufficient to escape the core explosion.

Sounds like a fantastic idea, but I can’t recall how they did it. But the Puppeteers are known for being extremely safety conscious, e.g. the Volvo manufacturers of the galaxy, selling ships that are legendary for their safety. So whatever they did it must have been seen as “safe” by the Puppeteers, right?

20

Jurassic Park is set on a very constrained locale (Isla Nublar) and is essentially a survival horror movie. Although the novel explores Michael Critchten’s ubiquitous theme of the dangers of the thoughtless misappilicaton of technology in pursuit of corporate profiteering the film emphasizes the visceral impact of the dinosaurs as predators. It isn’t particularly deep (and scarcely ‘science fiction’) but the actual story is very character-focused.

Ringworld is a vast tapestry of a “world” that is incomprehensibly large. Even describing the scale of it is essentially beyond human imagination, and any exploration of movie length will be necessarily limited to a very small portion. Of course, there is no reason that a production would have to reference anything else about Niven’s Known Space narrative universe but then it loses even more context, and as a “Big Dumb Object” a giant spinning ring isn’t that impressive of a concept. And I hate to disappoint, but visually the Ringworld is so vast that it would actually be visually unimpressive; from the perspective surface you such see a short arch rising up to a narrow illuminated thread instead of the large patches of terrain in alternating shadow and light shown in the artist’s rendition on the cover of the novel.

There is a reason that people have been trying and failing to develop a Ringworld movie for decades (ditto with Rendezvous With Rama) and why the Apple TV+ Foundation adaptation went almost immediately off the rails; because these concepts just don’t adapt well to film.

Stranger