¶ Dome: Rationale for the Big Dome
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Dome: Rationale for the Big Dome:
"This is why an iceberg melts so slowly. Its surface is so negligible in relation to its enormous volumetric mass and it can melt only as fast as it can get heat inside the iceberg, through its surface from the outside Universe, to do the interior melting. But as the iceberg melts its volume gets smaller at a velocity of the second power. Therefore as it gets ever smaller by melting, it melts faster and faster, You can see the little ice cube accelerating its rate of size diminution and finally disappearing-- zip!
"While there are other chemical phenomena involved, this surface-volume ratio also explains why it is that the Sun, being of such extraordinary size that, despite its giving off radiation at a fantastic rate, its volumetric mass is so great and its surface, through which it loses its heat, is so negligible, that it, the Sun, has already lasted ten billions of years and will go on lasting for hundreds of millions of years more.
"This is, then, one of the generalized principles of Universe entering into my statement that the bigger the geodesic dome the more efficiently it conserves energy. This principle.
¶ Citations
- RBF in Michael Ben-Eli Interview, AD, Dec’72
