Here we have two artist’s interpretation’s of “Ring and Bubble Worlds” hypothetical megastructures first theorised by physicist Freeman Dyson and popularised by legendary American Sci-fi author Larry Niven. The Ringworld concept was of course recently re-imagined and brought to the fore as the backdrop for Bungie’s seminal First Person Shooter “Halo”.
The top cover is interesting – though admittedly it’s visually descriptive, the scale is completely wrong – Larry Niven’s artificial world is about 600 Million miles in circumference – this would mean here that the central star is tiny! Also on closer inspection the topography is actually stuck on sideways and the whole thing looks more like a giant Zoetrope!…. anyway nitpicking aside, as a cover it still rocks
A “Dyson Ring” is the most simple form of a “Dyson Swarm” basically a vast collection of satellites strung around a star to capture solar energy, this differs slightly to the ring’s described in Niven’s novel and Halo which are actually artificial worlds. Freeman Dyson envisaged these concepts as a solution to meet the needs of a long-lived technological civiliastions energy requirements – that is to say if we succeed in not blowing ourselves/planet into dust and continue to evolve there may well come a time where we need to harness mass solar power from the sun.
Dyson Sphere’s and their variants are certainly fascinating concepts and not total science-fiction either – part of the SETI project (Search for Extra Terestial Intelligence) includes looking for “Infrared Heavy” spectra – which it is theorised a massive star encompassing structure would kick out. As for building one, with the global slowdown and general miserableness it’s probably not cards this year.
Read more about the Dyson Sphere here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere
Also of extreme interest and a good follow up bit of reading is “The Kardashev Scale” a method of measuring a technological civilisations energy needs – the crux of classifying this breaks down into the following:
Type 1 – A civilisation being able to harness all the power available on a planet.
Type 2 – A civilisation harnessing all the power available from a single star (dyson sphere)
Type 3 – A civilisation harnessing all potential energy from a galaxy! (godlike?)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale
I tend to find the more one reads about the actual Science behind Science Fiction the more one tends to rationalise that idea’s like little green folk zipping about the cosmos in Flying saucers or Millennium Falcons is unfortunately – quite probably – bollocks!
Art (I think!) by and Vincent Di Fate (Top) Dean Ellis (Lower) ……
Images sourced via Flickr’s user Jlever
Fantastic, especially the cover for Protector. I’ve not read the book but it looks like an ideal holiday destination.
Comment by Stephen Pill — March 26, 2009 @ 9:22 am
Haha, Yeah steve it does look like an Ideal holiday destination as long as you don’t float off
Comment by Kie — March 26, 2009 @ 9:31 am
Interesting how the artist on the Ringworld cover chose to put little pictures of a landscape on the inside of the ring, instead of trying to represent looking down on the surface of the ring world. I wonder if that was deliberate…
Not to mention the scale is wildly off. I admit, the scale of the thing is difficult to portray well. Only a few artists have seriously attempted it. Most covers for the book fall into the same category of trying to bring it down to a more human scale.
Hah. Nitpicky me. I always was a sucker for Niven’s “big orbital thing” novels.
Comment by Colin Peters — March 26, 2009 @ 10:28 pm
Hey Colin,
You’ve pretty much guessed my post! although it’s a great cover the scale is completely wrong and as you say it also shows the landscape flat! which is odd – looks more like a Zoetrope! I’ve not read the novels BTW – Whats the grassy ring on the cover of Protector? that look a bit out of scale too – cool though of course
Comment by Kie — March 30, 2009 @ 7:36 am
I haven’t read Protector either, actually. I should see if I can find it.
The scale of Ringworld really is pretty much impossible to convey, I think. It’s so huge that the entire Earth’s landmass is reproduced, full scale, as an archipelago, utterly lost in one of its oceans. And the whole thing is spinning to produce artificial gravity! Madness!
Comment by Colin Peters — March 31, 2009 @ 8:19 pm
Sounds pretty amazing! I am booking a holiday there then….
Comment by Kie — April 2, 2009 @ 6:30 am
I think Larry Niven is hidden gem in Science Fiction. Ringworld is one of my favorites.
Comment by Larry Niven Rules — May 29, 2009 @ 10:19 pm
Actually, both covers are by Dean Ellis, who did many covers for Niven’s Ballantine titles in the early 1970s.
Comment by Mark — August 30, 2009 @ 2:29 am
Cheers Mark, I think I realised that shortly after posting – the flickr Source had it marked as Vincent Di Fate…. I’lll amend that though …. cheers
Comment by Kie — August 31, 2009 @ 9:29 am
[...] This cover has a suitably epic in a similar vein to the covers Dean conjured up for Larry Niven’s Ringworld series, I posted about those about a year ago click here for a refresher… [...]
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