Quote:
Originally Posted by Noclevername
A swarm for living space also makes more sense, as you could produce a lot more habitats from the same mass of material as you can making a ringworld from it (and from conventional materials too, no need to invent supertough "scrith" or other unobtanium as you would need to make a working ringworld.)
|
I guess the only downside, from a story telling standpoint, is that the civilzation has to retain some rudimentary spaceflight, if you want to travel from one satellite (swarmlet?) to another. In Ringworld, which postulated a post-collapse civilization (at least in the first book), you could always just walk.
Still, a Swarm meta-civilization would make for a nice SF story collection. Each writer could create his own civilization on a satellite, and then you could introduce interactions between them, after a long period of no-communications. For example, the nano-technologists go visit a civilization on a Swarmlet that has reverted back to early Renaissance technology. If enough time had progressed, you could even start to get divergent evolutions of humanoid species (as in Ringworld).