On Sickness, Games, and Dyson Spheres
So, after 3 months of being off work and completely unable to concentrate, my liver tests are back to only mildly alarming and I'm going back to work on Monday. I've been bored out of my skull and have played more RPGs/strategy games in the last three months than I think I have my whole life before that
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You could effectively put in bottom drains, as they do in koi ponds, by carefully shaping the bottom topography. Add in a pump system and you would effectively be dredging the ocean.
Perhaps add in reverse osmosis systems to remove salt, and you might be able to keep the ocean in relative chemical balance. Probably need additional scrubbers to retrieve absorbed gasses and return them to the atmosphere.
That still leaves you a pile of sludge and salt residue, and no easy method to reconstitute them into mountains. You couldn't use the pressure of only 1 km of material to heat it up sufficiently to melt, even assuming it was being pushed down by 1G.
So you'd need an artificial heating source to melt it and an appropriate amount of adjacent rock. This liquid material would be lighter than surrounding rock and would work its way upward, causing the equivalent of earthquakes.
When it hit the surface, it would act as a hot spot volcano. Unless the system moved the melting system (faking plate tectonics), you'd get a huge Olympus Mons type shield volcano (Mars). If the system did move - perhaps a glorified torch on wheels on the bottom side of the construct - you would get a chain of volcanic events like Hawaii (or the Yellowstone area).
The explosiveness of the volcanoes would depend on chemical composition of the molten material and amount of dissolved gasses. If it simply took in ocean water and sediment, you'd have bigger explosions (water/steam makes bigger eruptions).
Of course, pumps, reverse osmosis and big torches are all big energy sinks. I'd have to do a bit of research to give you any numbers. But all of it is a matter of scale, as is the Dyson Swarm.
DS
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Here's a short list of the major things we'd need for long-term viability:
1. A way to keep oceans chemically balanced
2. A way to keep sediment build-up from eventually filling up the oceans
3. A way to deal with long-term erosion of terrain by wind, water, glaciers, etc.
4. A way to keep the atmosphere chemically balanced (i.e. recycle gasses scavenged over time by water and sediments - solved by volcanic eruptions in typical planetary bodies).
5. Possibly, we also need deep ocean currents as well. I suspect that the combination of weather, normal geographical gradients, and temperature fluctuations will already cause these, but if not, we might need to create them. The reason I think this is because I suspect that they might be important to marine life in some way - however, my knowledge of biology (and esp. marine biology) is even more limited than my knowledge of geology, so I'm really just guessing here.
6. Tides
I really like your idea of giant drains, pumps, and reverse osmosis to solve #1. The only problem would be that if we DID end up simulating plate tectonics, the geography of the oceans would change over time, necessitating the rebuilding of the entire pump/drain system periodically.
#4 could be solved by heating up the earth and creating periodic volcanoes. Your idea of a giant torch on wheels cracked me up :)
However, after thinking about this a bit, it seems that both plate tectonics (which cause earthquakes) and volcanoes are rather...well, dangerous. Geologically necessary, maybe, but still not pleasant for the biospheres they disrupt or destroy.
Really, much of this becomes necessary because we need to deal with erosion - i.e. the movement of material from the high points of terrain to the low points of terrain (i.e. a gradual flattening process).
If someone has taken the care to create an initial geography, I don't see a reason why they'd want to allow random earthquakes and volcanoes to mess that up. So, I think we want a different, less destructive, way to keep things in chemical balance.
My solution would be to use a combination of your drains/pumps/reverse osmosis, but instead of using volcanoes to redistribute the resulting sludge, use either nanotech or biological constructs. Basically, what you'd want is a swarm of "critters" to move the sludge, grain by grain, BACK onto the high points of the terrain.
They would need to know where to put the material, but there's no reason they couldn't do that through computational control by an AI or by embedding a map of the world (as it was originally created) into the genes of a biological creature. If any processing is needed, the creatures could also do that as well enroute (i.e. apply heat to the grain of sediment to turn it into magma, release trapped gasses, then let it cool before depositing it back onto the mountain).
In either case, the slow erosion of material would be counterbalanced by a constant stream of critters moving the material back to where it should go.
The combination of the pump/drain/reverse osmosis system in the oceans and the sediment-transport critters would solve problems 1 through 4, I believe.
Problem 5 (Currents) seems like it might already be solved naturally: According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_current, "Deep ocean currents are driven by density and temperature gradients". Given that we'll have "normal" weather, including wind and seasonal as well as daily temperature variation, this MIGHT be enough to form currents already. If not, it seems "easy" to simulate by just adding strategically placed giant pumps.
Problem 6 (Tides) would still be solved by a giant wave pool generator, I think.
You're right, it's all just a matter of scale. Mega-engineering, to be sure, but small-scale compared to creating the Dyson Sphere in the first place.
This is a fascinating conversation - thanks for adding your input!
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And the main pressure differences are driven by unequal distribution of sunlight based on latitude, and isolation of the poles. Winds act to even out the energy discrepancies.
Neither swarm system really has poles, as such. The flat version wouldn't have rotation either. The cylinder does have ends, but one of those is getting the most star energy. Cylinder rotation might create cells, but not sure of the scale, or what happens with the air along the central axis.
Surface ocean currents operate in the same manner, water moving heat to the colder areas and being deflected by planet rotation, and, to a lesser extent, continents.
Marine life is hardly monolithic, but the key is surface nutrients and sunlight. Cold polar seas are rich because nutrients upwell and the summer sun is up 24 hours a day. Local coastline is rich because the wind and currents move parallel to the shore creating upwelling as well.
Weak currents and weak nutrient transport and lack of upwelling. Less energetic weather, then less erosion and less nutrient transport into the system.
Tides are useful for certain environments, such as estuaries and tide pools, but do little for the overall health of the ecosystem. So a large scale wave machine would provide some verisimilitude, but not help much with the larger scale issues.
If one already had nanomachines moving sediments on a large scale, it wouldn't be much harder to divert some of the nutrients mechanically up to the surface waters, rather than to the mountains.
If you wanted large scale weather, then the system must manipulate the energy budget to different areas to create the temperature gradient. Not sure how to take care of the rotational aspect, assuming a spinning cylinder wouldn't hack it.
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