m. c. de marco: To invent new life and new civilizations...

Via deli.cio.us: in his blog entry of new, post-Singularity ideas, Rudy Rucker describes a variant of the Alderson disk. Here’s his even bigger Big Dumb Object:

What if Earth were an endless flat plane, and you could walk (or fly your electric glider) forever in a straight line and never come back to where you started? The cockroach zone! The kingdom of the two-headed men! One night there’ll be a rumble and, wow, our little planet will have unrolled, ready for you to start out on the ultimate On the Road adventure.

I know it’s a sign science fiction is dying that I’m tempted to say that this infinite flat earth, like many of his other fresh ideas, is not science fiction at all. It’s more of a planetary romance on an infinite backdrop; it’s science fantasy.

Update (9/11/2017)

To actually make an artificial infinite flat earth megastructure, you would need an empty universe (which, presumably, we’ll have some day) and some artificial suns whizzing by overhead, perhaps at the expected rate for a 24-hour day. And some construction process keeping ahead of the marching sword-and-sorcerers.