"Real" ringworlds

[Dingocat85]

Originally posted by Gwaihir:
[Responding to why an empire would build a ringworld in real life:] If you can, why not? Having mastered the universe, sounds like a fun project to keep you busy for a while.

Your empire would never get the chance...there would always be some sort of problem or another facing the empire, and unless you had a "purpose" to building a Ringworld, you'd ***never*** get it built.
Every single living organism on this planet (so naturally, every single living organism in the universe aswell) wants to do only one thing: Find and fix problems. Evolution long ago realized that the universe was very, very far from perfect conditions for any living organism...so, the only way to have an organism maintain (and maybe even proliferate) its species' survival, would be to have it endlessly looking for, and fixing problems.
So, no matter how happy your population got in real life, there would always be someone that was unhappy, wanting their problem to be fixed. If you stifled their unhappiness, feelings of discontent would build up, until - you guessed it - Revolution time.
Look at it this way: Your ears are designed to hear, so if there's no sound, they won't work. Your tastebuds are designed to taste, so if there's nothing to taste, they won't work. Organisms are designed to fix problems - so if there are no problems to fix, the organism won't work.

Here's a quote from The Matrix, that backs me up:

Agent Smith: "Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program...Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from."

Originally posted by Gwaihir:
or better yet, neworks of black holes - i bet you could get a lot of energy (or *something*) out of an orchestrated system of black holes, somehow."

The only thing physicists see as a use for black holes (besides a big trash can ) is going forward in time, in a sense. Assuming you have enough fuel to do this, if you approach a black hole at a specific angle (and at a fast enough speed that you avoid getting sucked in), you'll get whipped around the black hole (very fast, since the gravitational pull of a black hole is so high), and get slung away from it, traveling at incredible speeds.
The faster you're traveling in space, the slower time moves for you - in other words, 1 second for you on your fast ship, would be longer than 1 second on Earth - in this example, 1 second on your ship would result in a good deal of time passing on earth.
When your ship finally slows down and starts moving at more reasonable speeds, you will have hardly aged, while the rest of the everyone & everything else will have aged considerably.

[ May 14, 2003, 12:19: Message edited by: Dingocat85 ]