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Alderson disk


An Alderson disk (named after Dan Alderson, its originator) is a hypothetical artificial astronomical megastructure, like Larry Niven's Ringworld and the Dyson sphere. The disk is a giant with a thickness of several thousand miles. The Sun rests in the hole at the center of the disk. The outer perimeter of an Alderson disk would be roughly equivalent to the orbit of Mars or Jupiter. According to the proposal, a sufficiently massive disk would have a larger mass than its Sun.

The hole would be surrounded by a thousand-mile-high wall to prevent the atmosphere from drifting into the Sun. The outer rim would take care of itself.

Close to its surface, the gravity of the disk would closely approximate that of an infinite flat plate, for which gravity is perpendicular to the surface. Near the inner and outer edges of the plate, edge effects would become significant.

The mechanical stresses within the disc would be far beyond what any known material can stand, thus relegating such a structure to the realm of exploratory engineering until materials and construction science become sufficiently advanced. Building a megastructure of this magnitude would require an amount of material that far surpasses the amount of material found in the Solar System.

Life could exist on either side of the disk, though close to the Sun the heat would make life impossible without protection. Conversely, further away from the Sun living beings would freeze. Therefore, for the entirety of such a structure to be made habitable, it would have to include a vast number of life support systems.

Because the Sun remains stationary, there is no day/night cycle, only a perpetual twilight. This could be solved by forcing the Sun to bob up and down within the disk, lighting first one side then the other.

In 1974, the science fiction writer Larry Niven suggested that an Alderson disk "would be a wonderful place to stage a Gothic or swords-and-sorcery novel. The atmosphere is right, and there are real monsters." Because the zone habitable by humans is relatively narrow, the disc (and the cost of its construction) could be shared with aliens from hotter and colder planets. Over long periods of time, lifeforms would evolve to settle the sparsely-inhabited regions in between. "If civilization should fall, things could get eerie and interesting."


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