NationStates Jolt Archive

I was going through the NSeconomy statistics of my nation the other day, and I noticed that my region, which has exactly 100 nations, has an average population of 1,420,410,000 people per nation. Now 100 nations is rather large as regions go, so if we take this as a small slice of the total population of nationstates, we get a total nationstates population of 104266616460000 people, distributed across 73406 nations. This set me thinking, what kind of physical construct would it take to comfortably house all these nations?

Now, I assume most of you are familiar with the concept of a dyson sphere, which is essentially an artificial shell or buble of unimaginable size built around a star in order to trap nearly 100% of the energy given off, as opposed to the tiny fraction of a percentage that powers all life on earth, with people living on the interior of the shell. You can read more about the concept here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_Sphere.

I wondered, would such a construct be able to house such a vast amount of people? Well, me and a friend did some calculations to that effect, and came up with the following:

Using the classical model of a dyson sphere, in order to prevent people being burnt off the surface or frozen, it would have to have a radius approximately equal to that of the earth's orbit. This gives it an interior surface area of approximately 290333426674154300 square kilometers. Now, according to what appears to be one of the more accepted figures (by a small margin) the maximum population that the earth could comfortably hold is around 25 billion, so we will use that as our population density. So, at a density of 25 billion people per 510,072,000 km, that equals around 2127339263639.4048 square kilometers to house the entire population of nationstates. Thats one one-hundred-and-thirty-six-thousand-four-hundred-and-seventy-seventh of the entire sphere. Heres a more graphic demonstration:

http://img369.imageshack.us/img369/9927/sphereus4.png

The red area is....all of nationstates. Consider that that area is still many times the size of jupiter.

Mind-boggling isnt it? If humanity ever does end up creating a dyson sphere, I doubt we will ever manage to overpopulate it.

Now, I assume most of you are familiar with the concept of a dyson sphere...

It's amazing, the kind of assumptions that can reasonably be made about the posters of NSG. :tongue:

Nifty stuff though. I'd heard the Dyson sphere theory of NationStates before, but never really gave it much thought for reasons that are probably obvious. ;)

Ow...my brain hurts. I sort of get it, I think. Ok, I admit, thats a lie:p

I lost the game.

Ow...my brain hurts. I sort of get it, I think. Ok, I admit, thats a lie:p
How can you not get this? It's not like it's anywhere near as hard on the brain as vector calc.

How can you not get this? It's not like it's anywhere near as hard on the brain as vector calc.

I'm not even going to *dare* look up what vector calc is. My brain would probably explode right out of my head, leaving an awful mess for the cleaners to deal with. And that would be selfish.

I'm not even going to *dare* look up what vector calc is. My brain would probably explode right out of my head, leaving an awful mess for the cleaners to deal with. And that would be selfish.

http://i164.photobucket.com/albums/u6/nickclaw/HeadExplode.gif

How can you not get this? It's not like it's anywhere near as hard on the brain as vector calc.

Yeah, you know, some people don't have numbers brains.

Here is a simplified form:

If you take all the populations of all the nations in nationstates and add them together, that population could fit quite comfortably on a dyson sphere, a theoretical megastructure, 136466 times over.

Now you can ignore the maths while still getting your brain exploded by trying to comprehend that! Yay!

The problem with living on the inside of a constant density sphere is there will be no gravity.

Take a point A, say about a metre above the surface, inside the sphere.

Choose a circle of any diameter directly below this point, ie one metre away.

The material beneath this circle will have a certain gravitational pull on something at the point A.

Imagine the approximate cone shape if you connect the circle to point A, ie by drawing lines from each point on the circumference of the circle to point A.

Now, continue all those lines through point A until they intersect the opposite side of the inside of the Dyson sphere. You will have a much larger circle on the opposite side.

Gravity is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between two objects.

The area of the circle opposite is directly proportional to square of the distance between point A and its distance from the surface of the sphere.

Therefore, whatever gravitational pull exists on one side of the sphere is exactly counterbalanced by the gravitational pull on the opposite side.

Now your head will really explode.

The problem with living on the inside of a constant density sphere is there will be no gravity.

you know, by the time you get around to building dyson spheres, i somehow doubt this will pose any significant problem

you know, by the time you get around to building dyson spheres, i somehow doubt this will pose any significant problem

Fair enough. Creating artificial gravity will probably need an enormous amount of energy. The future natives of the sphere might need a binary star system. How sweet!

In any case, when will it be night time?

Based upon your calculation, it would only take a little over 17 doubling periods to fill the entire sphere. At current world population growth rates, that means it would be filled in no more than 1500 years (probably more around 1200-1400 years, but I'm rounding profusely here due to lack of a scientific calculator).

Obviously, the lower the population growth rate the longer the amount of time, but even at absurdly low rates it's still well within a reasonable stellar timeframe. If population isn't growing, well, it's sort of moot but this is easily the least likely scenario of all.

In any case, when will it be night time?

when the orbiting shadow-casters pass, i suppose

The shadow caster would have to be half a sphere i suppose. Those poor souls installing it would be heroes in a half-sphere.

If you take all the populations of all the nations in nationstates and add them together, that population could fit quite comfortably on a dyson sphere, a theoretical megastructure, 136466 times over.

Now you can ignore the maths while still getting your brain exploded by trying to comprehend that! Yay!

I think my brain is going to explode by trying to comprehend why this is so interesting to so many.

Good luck finding enough usable matter to create that Dyson Sphere.

Niven's Ringworld nonsense was a bit better mathed out, albeit no less infeasable.

Mind-boggling isnt it? If humanity ever does end up creating a dyson sphere, I doubt we will ever manage to overpopulate it.Is that a bet? And if that is I believe NSG is willing to take it up, although over a couple million revolutions of Pluto around the sun.

Heh, no, that isnt a bet.

And I didnt bring this up because I think that dyson spheres are likely, or even practical. A dyson SWARM is far more feasable and practical, should such a massive energy source be required. I just thought it was interesting to think that it could, in theory, be possible for a single, contiguous "world" to hold such an unreasonably large amount of nations as is present in NationStates.

Mind-boggling isnt it? If humanity ever does end up creating a dyson sphere, I doubt we will ever manage to overpopulate it.

Though building it is the hard part.

Ill keep it over there with my String theory Violin, lol...next to my Dark Matter powered Super Gravity...

one of the more accepted figures (by a small margin) the maximum population that the earth could comfortably hold is around 25 billion, so we will use that as our population density.

:tilts head: reaaaly? would you mind sourcing that figure, it reads as dramatically inflated.

All this from a vacuum cleaner, crazy, solid crazy.

:tilts head: reaaaly? would you mind sourcing that figure, it reads as dramatically inflated.

Depends on what exactly he means by "comfortably hold".

Going simply by population density alone and ignoring all other aspects, given the roughly (very roughly, yes) 150 million km2 of land area, there's enough space for 900 billion people to have as much room as the people of Hong Kong do (6000/km2 or about 150 m2/person, again roughly). It comes down to 45 billion for a Japan like population density (300/km2). For a roomy USA density (30/km2), it'd be around 4.5 billion. And for super roomy Australia (2.5/km2) it'd be 375 million. (And just for funs and grins, I looked up the last stated area of Daistallia 21`04 and compared it to the current population. There are roughly 9000 Daistallians/km2. No wonder they want off planet! And an earthly population density like that would mean 1.35 trillion people on earth! :P)

Sustainably hold, given current tech, at a US level of consumption, it maxs out at around 2 billion.

Depends on what exactly he means by "comfortably hold".

Ja, thanks Dai, this was my point exactly. 3 billion gets fequently billed as an idealised population with reduced material consumption (one figure i read equated this to West German consumption patterns circa 1970s). I think it rises to 4-4.5 billion with further reduced consuption. Incidentally the "real" (harhar) poulation denisty of the US is more like 94.1 - which is the density of the continental US (excluding Hawaii and Alaska). Austalia's population density is 2.6 now, what can i say, we're a nation/continent on the GROW.

A curious thought; if we were to have a planet the size of the amount of space that the entire population of NS takes on the Dyson sphere, the radius would have to be 411446.5697 km long, rounded off. This in turn would mean that our NS Earth would have a circumference of 2585195.0414. Man, imagine attempting to travel from Beijing to Chicago at the NS scale.

The Dyson sphere would need a LOT of statites/satellites to make...