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Shellworld
A shellworld is any of several types of hypothetical megastructures: *A planet or a planetoid turned into series of concentric matryoshka doll-like layers supported by massive pillars. A shellworld of this type features prominently in Iain M. Banks' novel ''Matter''. *A megastructure consisting of multiple layers of shells suspended above each other by orbital rings supported by hypothetical mass stream technology. This type of shellworld can be theoretically suspended above any type of stellar body, including planets, gas giants, stars and black holes. The most massive type of shellworld could be built around supermassive black hole A supermassive black hole (SMBH or sometimes SBH) is the largest type of black hole, with its mass being on the order of hundreds of thousands, or millions to billions, of times the mass of the Sun (). Black holes are a class of astronomical ...s at the center of galaxies. *An inflated canopy holding high pressure air around an otherwise airl ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Matter (novel)
''Matter'' is a science fiction novel from Iain M. Banks set in his Culture universe. It was published on 25 January 2008. ''Matter'' was a finalist for the 2009 Prometheus Award. Creation From an interview with ''The Guardian'' newspaper at the Hay Literary Festival on 25 May 2007: Banks tells me that he has spent the past three months writing another Culture novel. It will be called Matter and is to be published next February. "It's a real shelf-breaker," he says enthusiastically. "It's 204,000 words long and the last 4,000 consist of appendices and glossaries. It's so complicated that even in its complexity it's complex. I'm not sure the publishers will go for the appendices, but readers will need them. It's filled with neologisms and characters who disappear for 150 pages and come back, with lots of flashbacks and -forwards. And the story involves different civilizations at different stages of technological evolution. There's even one group who have disappeared up ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Megastructure
A megastructure (or macrostructure) is a very large artificial object, although the limits of precisely how large vary considerably. Some apply the term to any especially large or tall building. Some sources define a megastructure as an enormous self-supporting artificial construct. The products of megascale engineering or astroengineering are megastructures. Most megastructure designs could not be constructed with today's level of industrial technology. This makes their design examples of exploratory engineering, speculative (or exploratory) engineering. Those that could be constructed tend to qualify as megaprojects. Examples of megaprojects are the Zuiderzee Works in the Netherlands and Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the UAE. Megastructure (planning concept), Megastructures are also an architectural concept popularized in the 1960s where a city could be encased in a single building, or a relatively small number of buildings interconnected. Such arcology concepts are popular in sci ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Artificial Planet
An artificial planet (also planetary replica and replica planet) is a proposed circumstellar megastructure with sufficient mass to generate its own gravity field strong enough to prevent atmosphere from escaping, though the term has sometimes been used to describe other types of megastructures with self-sufficient ecosystems. The concept of an artificial planet appears in many works of science fiction. Science Artificial planet Mark Hempsell suggests that an artificial planet could be created in the Solar System in preparation for future space colonization, most likely in the habitable zone between the orbits of Venus and Mars. It could evolve from a smaller artificial space habitat. Its purpose would be similar to that of other megastructures intended as living spaces (such as the O'Neill cylinder) or to that of colonizing (or terraforming) existing planets. Unlike a space habitat, an artificial planet would be large enough to create its own gravity field, which would prev ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Megastructures
A megastructure (or macrostructure) is a very large artificial object, although the limits of precisely how large vary considerably. Some apply the term to any especially large or tall building. Some sources define a megastructure as an enormous self-supporting artificial construct. The products of megascale engineering or astroengineering are megastructures. Most megastructure designs could not be constructed with today's level of industrial technology. This makes their design examples of speculative (or exploratory) engineering. Those that could be constructed tend to qualify as megaprojects. Examples of megaprojects are the Zuiderzee Works in the Netherlands and Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the UAE. Megastructures are also an architectural concept popularized in the 1960s where a city could be encased in a single building, or a relatively small number of buildings interconnected. Such arcology concepts are popular in science fiction. Megastructures often play a part in the p ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Matryoshka Doll
Matryoshka dolls (), also known as stacking dolls, nesting dolls, Russian tea dolls, or Russian dolls, are a set of wooden dolls of decreasing size placed one inside another. The name ''Matryoshka'' is a diminutive form of ''Matryosha'' (), in turn a hypocorism of the Russian female first name '' Matryona'' (). A set of matryoshkas consists of a wooden figure, which separates at the middle, top from bottom, to reveal a smaller figure of the same sort inside, which has, in turn, another figure inside of it, and so on. The first Russian nested doll set was made in 1890 by wood turning craftsman and wood carver Vasily Zvyozdochkin from a design by Sergey Malyutin, who was a folk crafts painter at Abramtsevo. Traditionally the outer layer is a woman, dressed in a Russian sarafan dress. The figures inside may be of any gender; the smallest, innermost doll is typically a baby turned from a single piece of wood. Much of the artistry is in the painting of each doll, which can be ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Orbital Ring
An orbital ring is a concept of an artificial ring placed around a body and set rotating at such a rate that the apparent centrifugal force is large enough to counteract the force of gravity. For the Earth, the required speed is on the order of 10 km/sec, compared to a typical low Earth orbit orbital speed of 7.9 km/sec. The structure is intended to be used as a space station or as a planetary vehicle for very high-speed transportation or space launch. Because the cable is spinning faster than orbital velocity, there is a net outward force that is countered by internal tension within the cable. This resists any attempt to bend it and allows it to carry loads. In typical conceptions, a motorized platform is placed on the cable that runs in the opposite direction at the speed that makes it appear stationary above the ground. Above Earth's equator, a platform running at 9.5 km/sec in the direction opposite the cable will appear stationary and allow a cable to be lowe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Supermassive Black Hole
A supermassive black hole (SMBH or sometimes SBH) is the largest type of black hole, with its mass being on the order of hundreds of thousands, or millions to billions, of times the mass of the Sun (). Black holes are a class of astronomical objects that have undergone gravitational collapse, leaving behind spheroidal regions of space from which nothing can escape, including light. Observational evidence indicates that almost every large galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its center. For example, the Milky Way galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its center, corresponding to the radio source Sagittarius A*. Accretion of interstellar gas onto supermassive black holes is the process responsible for powering active galactic nuclei (AGNs) and quasars. Two supermassive black holes have been directly imaged by the Event Horizon Telescope: the black hole in the giant elliptical galaxy Messier 87 and the black hole at the Milky Way's center (Sagittarius A*). Descr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Galaxies
A galaxy is a system of stars, stellar remnants, interstellar gas, dust, and dark matter bound together by gravity. The word is derived from the Greek ' (), literally 'milky', a reference to the Milky Way galaxy that contains the Solar System. Galaxies, averaging an estimated 100 million stars, range in size from dwarfs with less than a thousand stars, to the largest galaxies known – supergiants with one hundred trillion stars, each orbiting its galaxy's centre of mass. Most of the mass in a typical galaxy is in the form of dark matter, with only a few per cent of that mass visible in the form of stars and nebulae. Supermassive black holes are a common feature at the centres of galaxies. Galaxies are categorised according to their visual morphology as elliptical, spiral, or irregular. The Milky Way is an example of a spiral galaxy. It is estimated that there are between 200 billion () to 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe. Most galaxies are 1,000 to 10 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Exploratory Engineering
Exploratory engineering is a term coined by K. Eric Drexler to describe the process of designing and analyzing detailed hypothetical models of systems that are not feasible with current technologies or methods, but do seem to be clearly within the bounds of what science considers to be possible within the narrowly defined scope of operation of the hypothetical system model. It usually results in paper or video prototypes, or (more likely nowadays) computer simulations that are as convincing as possible to those that know the relevant science, given the lack of experimental confirmation. By analogy with protoscience, it might be considered a form of protoengineering. Usage Due to the difficulty and necessity of anticipating results in such areas as genetic modification, climate change, molecular engineering, and megascale engineering, parallel fields such as bioethics, climate engineering and hypothetical molecular nanotechnology sometimes emerge to develop and examine hypo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
