🚀 go-pugleaf

References: <l2h4shINNoe5@jethro.Corp.Sun.COM>

jdr@starflight.Corp.Sun.COM (Jon Roland) writes:
        [much science fantasy deleted]
-> Strictly speaking, a large population and a high level of consumption
-> are only problems if people do not live in such closed systems. Earth
-> could support a million such starship-cities, each with a million
-> inhabitants living in civilized comfort, for the next five billion
-> years, without occupying more than one percent of the land surface,
-> and none at all if they are built underground. The natural ecosystem
-> could then be allowed to return to something like its original state,
-> or even be restored. A limited number of people could still visit the
-> wilderness -- under controlled conditions. The surface would not even
-> be needed for food production. Food could be produced in factories.
-> [...]
->
-> Serious environmentalists need to be uniting to get the first of such
-> cities designed and built while there is still time.

Where will the material to build 1,000,000 cites like this come from?
Where will the materials to build the factories and support
infrastructure come from?  Where will the technical know-how come from?
What you suggest is not within our techonological capabilities, to say
nothing of what is politically possible.

I doubt that we will be capable of constructing such self-sustaining
cities within the next 200 years.  I suspect it will take a much longer
time than that to convince any significant number of people to move
there.

mIkE
----
alternate: mike@batpad.lgb.ca.us