Miles Dyson Quotes

I myself have dreamed up a structure intermediate between Dyson spheres and planets. Build a ring 93 million miles in radius - one Earth orbit - around the sun. If we have the mass of Jupiter to work with, and if we make it a thousand miles wide, we get a thickness of about a thousand feet for the base. And it has advantages. The Ringworld will be much sturdier than a Dyson sphere. We can spin it on its axis for gravity. A rotation speed of 770 m/s will give us a gravity of one Earth normal. We wouldn't even need to roof it over. Place walls one thousand miles high at each edge, facing the sun. Very little air will leak over the edges. Lord knows the thing is roomy enough. With three million times the surface area of the Earth, it will be some time before anyone complains of the crowding.

They reached Albuquerque, Dyson seeing for the first time the deceptively clear air and the red desert beneath still snowy peaks. Feynman bore into town at 70 miles per hour and was immediately arrested for a rapid sequence of traffic violations. The justice of the peace announced that the fine he handed down was a personal record.

Darwin’s great treatise appeared in November 1859, but, recalled Butler, “being on my way to New Zealand when the Origin of Species appeared, I did not get it until 1860 or 1861.”41 The long sea voyage, the grand spectacle of the New Zealand wilderness, and a religious upbringing that sought to shift its convictions to a scientific faith rendered Butler keenly receptive to the theories presented in Darwin’s book. Reading Origin of Species by candlelight in a thatched-roof hut, the constellations of the Southern Hemisphere above, Butler’s imagination took flight beyond where Darwin left off. “Residing eighteen miles from the nearest human habitation, and three days’ journey on horseback from a bookseller’s shop, I became one of Mr. Darwin’s many enthusiastic admirers,” Butler recollected, “and wrote a philosophical dialogue (the most offensive form, except poetry and books of travel into supposed unknown countries, that even literature can assume) upon the Origin of Species.”42

Billions of dollars were sunk into cables spanning six continents and three oceans, and a web of optical fiber engulfed the world. When the operation peaked in 1991, fiber was being rolled out, globally, at over 5,000 miles per hour, or nine times the speed of sound: Mach 9.