Building Loads on PressuShells

> There isn't enough room for them on the planet already. We can only afford
> the luxury of having animals for food in the west because most of the world
> population is living on the edge of survival. If the current world
> population would eat from MacDonalds it would starve in a year.

I would like to see what mathematical and statistical support do you have for
the declarations above, because there are several examples of third-world
countries where consumption of meat per capita is in the same level of
several first-world Western countries; for instance, Brazil consumes as much
meat per capita as the United Kingdom, while Uruguay and Argentina are in a
higher level, closer to Germany and France (data from
http://earthtrends.wri.org/text/AGR/variables/193.htm); and we (I'm
Brazilian) do not significantly import meat - actually, we are meat
*exporters*. And we are talking about countries with many tens of millions of
people. So, your implicit declarations that Earth cannot supply a population
of "carnivores" and that only Westerners are "carnivores" (who supposedly
prey on the cattle of poor third-worlders) seems a bit... nonsensical,
paraphrasing yourself. Aren't you just repeating standard ecofreakish
alarmism?

On the other hand, I would agree that the maximum possible population limit
for Earth is much higher when you consider a population of vegetarians.
Production of meat is a resource-inneficient process.

> Indeed, unless something happens that
> wipes a couple of billions people off the face of the planet (and every
> generation), meat is going to be a luxury already here, and pretty soon.

Let me see... The United States are seemingly self-suficient in meat
production, right? *And* they have a demographic density of 33
inhabitants/square kilometer. So, why the whole world can't produce enough
meat (even at a United States consumption level), since the demographic
density of Earth is 35 inhabitants/square kilometer? Of course you could
evoque population growth in the future, but that's unlikely; the previsions
for population growth in the future are being continuously lowered over the
decades, and in fact population *shortage* seems a more likely problem in the
long run.

It seems that you're assuming that the miserable condition of most of Humanity
is a result of the scarceness of resources on Earth, but that's not really
the problem. The problem is that the resources and, mainly, the investments
are distributed in an extremely uneven way among the population of Earth.

> You can expect your average space folk to eat reconstituted yeasts,
> probably arranged in a very glamorous shape and color, and sold in
> irresistibly attractive packaging.

Again, you're talking about yeast. Actually, cultivating single-celled
organisms like yeast is often a more complex operation than using more
complex creatures, because you need a lot of mechanical equipment to control
a lot of biochemical and physical parameters in the culture medium. Complex
plants, on the other hand, are in a great deal self-adaptable and less
finicky to environmental conditions. That may explain why most of the
research on space agriculture nowadays is focused on growing wheat and other
macroscopic stuff. I haven't heard about space agriculture with cyanobacteria
and related micro-stuff since the 60's...

As for the rest of your post (discussing the influence of a social pyramid in
the type and frequency of residential units inside a habitat), I agree with
it.

> Sure. They will want that.
> They will want beautiful houses with white columns on the front, and
> gardens and orchards and swimming pools. And they will want to ride horses
> in their private parks as well.
> Some of them will too. Someone does even today.
> For every one of them anyway there will be hundred thousands if not
> millions of people who will live their ordinary lives in a small cubicles
> in the shell, and they will have to work hard to afford to pay the rent.
> It's called "Capitalism", you live in it.
> Since politics and social structures evolve much more slowly and take
> extremely longer times than technology to improve you can expect that by
> the time there will be habitats in every corner of the system the social
> system won't have changed that much. Probably the lowest cast (those who
> today live in Africa, India or China, eat little and generally die of
> disease before they reach maturity) will be gone, upgraded to some kind of
> low level working class, with the rest of the population living
> proportionally improved lifestyles. That's what happened so far if you look
> back, I see no reason to expect that to change anytime soon...
> Still, for every nicely landscaped house with garden inside the habitat
> surface you can have hundreds cubicles (apartments, flats, call them as you
> prefer) cheaper living accommodations built underneath in the shell. The
> privilege will be priced accordingly.
>
> Cheers,

Cheers,

> Claudio

Lucio