The world in which essentially all three billion humans lived, as depicted from "above" (high over the North Pole, looking "down" on the whole system) was a hair-thin ring some eighty-four thousand kilometers across—roughly seven times the diameter of the blue-and-white planet in its center. The objects that made up the ring, though they seemed big to the humans who lived in them, were evanescent particles compared to the ring’s overall scale. Imagine the thinnest possible jewelry chain, a nearly invisible trace of platinum around a woman’s neck. Make a perfect circle of that same chain ten meters in diameter, and that gives a picture of the ring’s thinness in comparison to its overall size. It was more easily viewed in artificial renderings like the one on Kath Two’s varp, where the points that made up the ring—the individual habitats—were drawn as unrealistically large, color-coded pips.