Larry Niven Quotes

“I myself have dreamed up a structure intermediate between Dyson spheres and planets. Build a ring 93 million miles in radius - one Earth orbit - around the sun. If we have the mass of Jupiter to work with, and if we make it a thousand miles wide, we get a thickness of about a thousand feet for the base.

And it has advantages. The Ringworld will be much sturdier than a Dyson sphere. We can spin it on its axis for gravity. A rotation speed of 770 m/s will give us a gravity of one Earth normal. We wouldn't even need to roof it over. Place walls one thousand miles high at each edge, facing the sun. Very little air will leak over the edges.

Lord knows the thing is roomy enough. With three million times the surface area of the Earth, it will be some time before anyone complains of the crowding.”
― Larry Niven

“[Edward Teller} had “the most important kvestion of all”. Leaning closer, he said, “Vill you be villing to vork on veapons?”

Unbidden, images from Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr. Strangelove leaped to mind. But Teller had impressed me as a deep, reflective man. I said I would—occasionally, at least. I had grown up deep in the shadow of the Cold War. My father was a career army officer, and I had spent six years living with my family in occupied post-war Japan and Germany. It seemed to me that the best, indeed the only, way to avoid strategic conventional war, whose aftermath I had seen in shattered Tokyo and Berlin. ....

That afternoon began my long, winding involvement with modern science and fiction, the inevitable clash of the noble and imaginary elements in both science and fiction with the gritty and practical. I have never settled emotionally the tensions between these modes of thinking. Growing up amid the shattered ruins of Germany and Japan, with a father who had fought through World War II and then spent long years occupying the fallen enemy lands, impressed me with the instability of even advanced nations. The greatest could blunder the most.”
― Greg Bear, New Legends