this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2026
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
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What I'm describing is actually possible with ordinary materials, unlike the space elevator. This is less science fiction than a space elevator. Steel is good enough. Oh, and the throughputs possible for systems like this make a space elevator look like a toy.
I'm referring to concepts like the orbital ring.
You could absolutely build a train to space using such active support methods. And a more fanciful and impractical version is vast water-filled structures that allow one to literally a sail a boat to the Moon. I doubt someone would actually go to the trouble of building such a massive and impractical construct for such a silly purpose. But in principle it is possible.
I do think you need active components to keep it stable. Might also be in the range already, where gravitation itself rips it appart.
I don't think you understand the concept. "Gravitation itself rips it apart?" The whole idea is based on the idea of harnessing gravity and orbital mechanics.
I think i do? But earths gravitational field is a potato, which is why constellation satellites like GPS and Starlink need to adjust now and then. And even if it were a perfect sphere, there's still the moon and the other planets pulling on it. Look at Jupiters Lagrange points for a example how wobbly space around the sun actually is:
L3, L4 and L5 are fields of pebbles (asteroids) Jupiter pushes/pulls around it's orbit by deforming space.
About ripping apart: no matter how high the tensile strength of the material; scale it up enough and it's a sandcastle. Wikipedia has a small table here for the lightest materials and i think Steel is around 100 km. That combined with the potato grav field of earth and it breaks apart.
Ok I'm sorry. Yes, it likely would require some minimal active control to maintain stability. You have a point about perturbations from other bodies. But the Trojan asteroids and Lagrange points have minimal effect. And it's not like the gravitational field around the Sun actually changes that much, percentage wise, unless you're right up close to the planets. The Trojans and Lagrange points are just examples of locations where objects gently placed in certain locations can maintain stability.
Jupiter's Hill Sphere has a radius of 50 million kilometers (actually much smaller than the outer gas giants.) Its orbital radius is more like 780 million km.
Now, this does mean it would be quite difficult to build a Solar System-sized orbital ring right near the orbital path of gas giant, or any other planet. You could build a ring around Jupiter, but building a Solar-centric ring right near Jupiter's orbit would be a problem.
are you saying the large extent of the two Trojan fields shows "wobbliness" of space? because you'd expect all the debris to be right at the exact L4 and L5 points?
if so - no, because a LaGrange point is (despite being massless itself) something a light body can have a stable orbit around. it's not just the only stable point, it allows a large zone for stable orbits.
Yeah, but a structure going through it all would break – ignoring realistic materials.
Any games that allows us to explore that concept? Sounds like the perfect stuff for shenanigans