Zel wrote:

The best though would be a disk built on the back of a giant space creature, like a turtle.

You forgot the elephants :P

The O’Neill cylinder seems the most feasible to me. Imagine hundreds of them, next to each other in a 90° corner to the sun, all revolving around it like earth does. Perfect seasons, day/night cycle, no problem at all with gravity (it would be a bit stronger I think)..

The Dyson Sphere thing seems to also require all the materials from the solar system, so if we were to build one it would also means good bye to Earth. Even if we wanted to spare it somehow, stripping Jupiter only would be enough to alter its orbit significantly, so it’s unlikely our homeworld would remain unchanged.

I rather like the idea of a Dyson Swarm-like thing built closer around the star to gather all its energy, and some larger scale Bernal Spheres for the actual habitation/industry. I assume these hollow spheres are supposed to be lived on the inside, not unlike the Dyson Sphere. Artificial lighting seems the way to go since all the light of the star would be used by the swarm to produce energy anyway, and it’s easier to provide artificial light inside a sphere than outside.

Also, care to explain why an Anderson Disk would be gravitationally locked to the star and a Ringworld wouldn’t ? They seem very similar in approach, with only different parameters for width or depth. I’d say neither of them are, but my physics lessons are long forgotten.

The best though would be a disk built on the back of a giant space creature, like a turtle.

I’ve got a special place in my heart for The Ringworld.

I read “The Ringworld Engineers”, in hardcover, right after it was released– it was the first “hard core” Science Fiction novel I had ever read.

As a die-hard, and somewhat irrational, Larry Niven fan, I want a house on The Ringworld!!!

PS: The Ringworld Engineers seems to resolve the inherent stability of The Ringworld.

Yeah… the last one was new to me and I spontaneously had a list of “If this ones construction goes wrong we’re screwed.”

Well, as much as I like Nivens work the one I’d like to see most is a Dyson Swarm. Imagine some thousand tiny worlds, all with a habitable space about the size of Europe and all different.
Different climate, different flora and fauna and different cultures…

If something went wrong during the engineering of that last one, we’d be a bit fucked if it made the one habitable planet we’ve got into an inhabitable collection of rubble.

Maybe if we invent ftl travel and ansible communication so we can just zip about the universe at will and distance no longer presents a meaningful barrier to us or communication, maybe then we’d expand out to not be so reliant on this little blue planet of ours and could turn it into what honestly looks more like modern art.