A monopoly over efficient use of materials? (was Earth: Rock City)

From: hitssquad
Sent: Thursday, March 08, 2012 10:40 PM
To: spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [spacesettlers] A monopoly over efficient use of materials? (was Earth: Rock City)

--- In mailto:spacesettlers%40yahoogroups.com, "William" wrote:
> They won't be building planets, they'll be building space habitats. Which will use many orders of magnitude less material per person.

How would space habitation hold a monopoly over efficient use of materials? If it weren't for the lack of sufficient nitrogen (to use as a buffer gas), 5,974 quintillion tonne Earth might be made to hold quintillions of humans.

Not unless youre planning to tear it all down and build a Niven Ring or a Dyson Sphere or some such

Since Venus's atmosphere holds many times as much nitrogen as Earths' does, perhaps some could be imported from there to improve the efficiency of the use of Earth's other building materials.

> A Bernal Sphere I think weighs 4 megatons and houses 140,000 people [...] or 28 tons per person, not the whatever tons per person that planet Earth currently "houses".

5.974e21 tonnes / 7 billion people = 853 billion tonnes per person. Earth isn't exactly "full" of people yet.

Once again, unless you take one of the options above, or, perhaps you plan to honeycomb the entire planet down to the core to make room for all those folks...oopsw, that lavas gonna fill up all yalls tunnels. LOL