Comments on: Great balls of everything

Great balls of everything

blahblahblah — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 07:43:50 -0800

The Minor History of Giant Spheres is an illustrated timeline of, well, giant spheres, including the spherical republic of KugelMugel and the great Darwin Twineball. Also online is the Minor History of Miniature Writing, and the related timeline of timelines [prev.].

By: brownpau

brownpau — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 08:02:47 -0800

I'm curious as to why EPCOT's Spaceship Earth isn't on the list.

By: Astro Zombie

Astro Zombie — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 08:07:03 -0800

They don't have the giant silver space sphere that killed Queen Latifah by throwing jellyfish at her.

By: Henry C. Mabuse

Henry C. Mabuse — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 08:11:57 -0800

Where is Perry Rhodan's ship? Where is the Death Star?

By: shothotbot

shothotbot — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 08:12:30 -0800

1) do they still clean the Parisian sewers by letting big wooden balls roam around? 2) does anyone know anything more about the Costa Rican Spheres of Mystery?

By: GuyZero

GuyZero — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 08:21:00 -0800

And what about Rover? But I thought it was a pretty good list of some obscure giant spheres.

By: yhbc

yhbc — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 08:27:06 -0800

Spaceship Earth is on the list, and the Death Star is mentioned.

By: Henry C. Mabuse

Henry C. Mabuse — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 08:28:24 -0800

And Galactus' ship.

By: brownpau

brownpau — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 08:59:14 -0800

Ah, now I see Spaceship Earth; it just didn't get a photo. The Christian Science Maparium was a new one to me. And doesn't Lewis Fry Richardson's Forecast Factory remind one just a bit of the Galactic Senate?

By: kimota

kimota — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 09:08:19 -0800

They forgot about AC/DC.

By: Henry C. Mabuse

Henry C. Mabuse — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 09:27:49 -0800

PERRY FUCKING RHODAN, people

By: Henry C. Mabuse

Henry C. Mabuse — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 09:29:18 -0800

And what about that Jules Verne one, where the one guy sticks plates of that metal all over the outside & opens it up with flaps & shit? And E E 'Doc' Smith's Skylark? MY GHOD

By: Henry C. Mabuse

Henry C. Mabuse — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 09:32:14 -0800

I know more about this than is healthy.

By: DU

DU — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 09:36:36 -0800

Wait--go back to the Parisian sewers. What now?

By: DU

DU — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 09:38:28 -0800

Also, no Betelgeuse??

By: cenoxo

cenoxo — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 09:41:40 -0800

HCM, you may be thinking of the Cavorite-propelled sphere from the 1901 H.G. Wells story, The First Men in the Moon (and the 1964 movie.)

By: DU

DU — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 09:48:17 -0800

Oh, the Paris thing is in the article. The buildup of water pressure behind the balls forces them through the tunnel network until they emerge somewhere downstream pushing a mass of filthy sludge. This seems implausible. It's hard to tell the scale, but it seems unlikely they'd get more than a few hundred pounds of force. Even if no one clog required that much, there's a lot of friction involved in moving the entire mass to the end. (Googling around, I found another link with almost exactly the same text, which would argue for something like an urban legend. A third link mentioned silt and sand, not sludge, which seems a lot more likely.)

By: cenoxo

cenoxo — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 10:10:04 -0800

Then there's the first artificial satellite/space station, launched into a 4,000 mile high orbit by water-powered flywheels — Edward Everett Hale's short story, The Brick Moon (1869).

By: DU

DU — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 10:24:05 -0800

That flywheel launcher is awesome, as is the technovelgy site itself. Great link.

By: kittens for breakfast

kittens for breakfast — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 10:26:47 -0800

First thing in the morning, I read this as "The Minor History of Giant Spiders." Holy CRAP that would have been awesome.

By: homunculus

homunculus — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 10:39:15 -0800

MetaFilter: I know more about this than is healthy.

By: nickyskye

nickyskye — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 10:44:41 -0800

As ever, wonderful post, blahblahblah, thanks. Didn't expect those spheres to be so interesting. Loved the timeline of timelines too.

By: George_Spiggott

George_Spiggott — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 10:58:44 -0800

Buckminster Fuller proposes the "Cloud Nine" project, a levitating city of "tensegrity" spheres, each a mile in diameter. This was the first thing I thought of when I saw this post, so I was glad to find that it was included. And then there's this: Echo 1, America's first communications satellite. The 100-foot mylar "satalloon" is coated in shiny, radio-reflective aluminum Between "tensegrity" and "satalloon", my day is pretty well made.

By: quin

quin — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 11:13:32 -0800

Those are some big fuckin' balls ya got there.

By: pax digita

pax digita — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 12:26:38 -0800

1959 Physicist Freeman Dyson suggests that a giant shell of matter be constructed around a star to collect its total energy output. Dyson thought that the idea for such a sphere would be so self-evident to any advanced civilization that he suggested searching the skies for them as evidence of extra- terrestrial intelligence. I wondered if this doc would mention Dyson spheres, and by golly, it did. I wonder how an advanced civilization would live on the interior of one, though. Would the gravitational attraction from the matter on the shell be sufficient to keep them and everything else in their world from drifting around in the interior of the shell? If not, then it would be a very peculiar place to reside. For example, it might be neat to be able to fly, like Icarus and Daedalus, around inside one of these things, but also like them, you might have to worry about getting too close to the sun.

By: George_Spiggott

George_Spiggott — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 12:55:58 -0800

And then there's the Megasphere, from Larry Niven's essay "Bigger Than Worlds". For this you dismantle the outermost stars in a galaxy and use the matter to build a sphere around the galactic core. This time you live on the outside. Gravity would be trifling, but you can have an atmosphere light-years deep and effectively live in free-fall.

By: pilgrim

pilgrim — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 15:45:54 -0800

The big balls used for cleaning pipes are known as pigs. At least, they are in petrochemical refineries. That's a, lemme see now, thirty-one year-old bit of chemistry trivia I never thought I'd use for anything...