But the ringworld represents an American fantasy of an ever-expanding but completely homogenized Western frontier. America, for example, is not culturally homogenous nor does it go on forever. The point of writing a story with an explorable big dumb object that yields fields of nothing different than what came before is not a one-to-one comparison to any real place. Who needs a universal translator when there's no one to talk to, nothing to translate? Yes, the theme of Ringworld might best be summed up thus"Get everything, use nothing." The babelfish, a universal language translator, supports the same theme of emptiness as the ringworld. The pointlessness of the ringworld's vastness is the point.
As you can see from the map below, the scale of the ringworld is ridiculously big. Indeed, the ringworld is a Trump tower when all we needed was a three-bedroom bungalow.
The place is a vast oasis of livable space made larger by its emptiness. It turns out that the ringworld is all but abandoned. Unmanageability resonates as one of Ringworld's central themes. Rockefeller and others who pushed non-renewable resources on us in trade for massive wealth and environmental fallout. No, we're ignoring our best resource, chained by the decisions of John D. We don't even use the 1x amount of the energy we should be collecting from our star. After all, the earth is bathed in 5000 times the energy humans need. I wonder about the unmanageability of all that energy we'd collect if we lived in a big, hulking Dyson sphere. I wonder, for example, why humans would ever need millions of more times the real estate of planet earth. Thinking big is fun, but thinking little is often more prosperous. If a ringworld is possible, then what else? Can we move stars around? Can we create Cinderella planets? Consider the ringworld's theoretical upgrade, the Dyson sphere, a complete sphere around a star rather than a mere ring, a solution meant to make use of all the energy emitted by a star and a structure that would require planet harvesting on an order magnitudes more involved than building a ringworld. Ringworlding is engineering on a galactic scale. The boldness of the ringworld is that it unlocks so many possibilities. But then I started to wonder about a land with nearly nothing where everything reflects a brutal sameness. Big and cool, the ringworld is an image of the sublime, but it reflects the fantasies of a relatively newly minted colonial power: America. The idea of harvesting space flotsam and jetsam, the material from planets, moons, and asteroids of multiple star systems, to make a ring one AU out from the center of a solar system is insane in scope, fascinating, and bold as hell. In the first blush of my love of science fiction, Ringworld's gently curving steel reflected beauty like a brightly burning star.
0 kommentar(er)
