Megastructures

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Pages: 104. Chapters: Space elevator, Dyson sphere, Ringworld, Death Star, Trantor, Orbital, Stanford torus, Unicron, Mega-City One, Non-rocket spacelaunch, Great Wall of China, Dyson spheres in popular culture, Bering Strait crossing, Brit-Cit, Halo, Proposed tall buildings and structures, Launch loop, Megastructure, Atlantropa, Banaue Rice Terraces, Space fountain, Space sunshade, Traction City, Coruscant, Island Three, Star lifting, Vactrain, Hondo City, Globus Cassus, Transatlantic tunnel, Matrioshka brain, Space gun, Trans Global Highway, Tipler cylinder, The City of Gold, Space dock, Ciudad Barranquilla, Rama, Skyhook, Stellar engine, Buster Machine III, Well World, Ecumenopolis, Sungbo's Eredo, Megascale engineering, Rocket sled launch, Alderson disk, Pendor, Walls of Benin, Bishop Ring, Dyson-Harrop satellite, New Babylon, Metropolitan Area Outer Underground Discharge Channel, San Alfonso del Mar, Shadow Planet Killer, McKendree cylinder, Godwheel, Road City, Cosmopolitan Railway, Topopolis, Artificial world, Astroengineering, Greater East Asia Railroad. Excerpt: A space elevator is a proposed non-rocket spacelaunch structure (a structure designed to transport material from a celestial body's surface into space). Many elevator variants have been suggested, all of which involve travelling along a fixed structure instead of using rocket-powered space launch, most often a cable that reaches from the surface of the Earth on or near the equator to geostationary orbit (GSO) and a counterweight outside of the geostationary orbit. Discussion of a space elevator dates back to 1895 when Konstantin Tsiolkovsky proposed a free-standing "Tsiolkovsky" tower reaching from the surface of Earth to geostationary orbit 35,785 km (22,236 miles) up. Like all buildings, Tsiolkovsky's structure would be under compression, supporting its weight from be...