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Ringworld exists - Found by Hubble!
Dracul writes: "Niven was a prophet, clearly this object is not a giant hamburger, but rather evidence that Homo Habilis really was Pak!"
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This looks like a garden burger. But seriously, it looks like the early stages of the dust cloud being blow out by solar winds. it's just natural that it would follow the gravity/spin of the star. lucky us to be at the right angle to see it. Yay Hubble!
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
For those that didn't read the article, its a ring of matter expelled by a dying star.
Oh, and if I remember the series right, the Pak didn't build the Ringworld, they just found it. (Fawn built it).
The thing looks more like a yo-yo. Clearly god's way of telling us the universe continuously expands and then contracts... clearly.
"And like that
Hardly obscure. Larry Niven's "Known Space" future history is one of the most well-known story universes in SF -- and assuming you've at least heard of it is an understandable assumption for a geek site to make.
Ringworld won Nebula and Hugo awards when it was published. Ten years later the massive continuing flow of fan letters and mathematical papers forced Niven to write a sequel, The Ringworld Engineers, also very good. He followed it up some 12-16 years later by publishing The Ringworld Throne which was mostly crap.
The "Ringworld" is a gigantic artifical ring of solid matter constructed around a star, one million miles wide, six hundred million miles long, and several hundred feet thick. The inner surface is habitable (and, of course, fucking gigantic in surface area).
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Larry Niven, author of the Ringworld books, among others is hardly obscure. He also coined the term flash crowd. Google, as always, turns up a wealth of information.
On a related note, due to the inherent instabilities of a ringworld, I would suggest looking for signs of jets (or other methods of in-space propulsion) around the peripherary of the disk. That should provide significant evidence as to whether it's really a ringworld, or "just" a belt of dust, as the article indicates.
Louis Wu is a recuring character in Niven's books. He plays a major role in the Ringworld series, he's seen in various Kzin stories, and he just crops up every now-and-then.
If any of you had read the explanation on the excellent APOD site, you'd have seen that this thing had already been found in 1985 by Arturo Gomez. This is hust a new Hubble picture of it.
Karma: none (due to not believing in reincarnation)
Come to think of it, that's probably why the .mil proxy server I sit behind eight hours a day blocks it, too.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
I don't recall the story name, but didn't they go look at some antimater system/galaxy or something? The GP hull was destroyed in a series of mater/antimater collisions with free particles in the area. The contents of the hull, drive system, controls & etc, hung together long enough for them to get home.