OK. We have plenty of examples of "geostationary" satellites. Actually, they aren't quite "stationary", but see below. So instead of placing a satellite in geostationary orbit every 1 degree or 1 minute or 1 second of arc, we alternatively could place a *ring* in orbit at the same distance of ~22kmiles. Now since the self-gravitational effect of the ring can be quite small if the ring is perhaps only a thread, as there are extremely mild stresses on this thread absent any object inadvertently severing the thread. There is a problem with geo "stationary" satellites, however: they must occasionally burn fuel to keep their "station", else they all end up over the Indian Ocean (slight excess of gravity there). One could, however, put an extremely small carbon fiber thread between each pair of satellites, and thereby avoid having to burn any more fuel for station-keeping. This carbon fiber could be exceedingly thin -- much, much thinner than any proposed "space elevator" cable, because the forces would be orders of magnitude smaller. It might even make sense to utilize an exceedingly thin optical fiber instead, so that these geostationary satellites now have very high interconnection data rate (& potentially quantum-entangled states -- e.g., quantum key distribution). Now *that* would enable some serious "cloud computing". At 04:59 PM 7/22/2015, rcs@xmission.com wrote:

the product of the highest feature and the object's diameter would be 40,000 miles. (Please excuse the non-metric units.) For Earth, it's 8000 miles times 5 miles, which is the height of Mount Everest. The square root is 200 miles, meaning that the largest arbitrarily-shaped "thing" (grand piano, person, carrot, desk, etc.) that you can have is about 200 miles across.

Of course exotic things like carbon fiber can stretch that, but only so much.