Transportation within a habitiat

--- In spacesettlers@y..., Lucio de Souza Coelho wrote:
> From: "victoriatangoman"
> To:
> Sent: Monday, July 08, 2002 7:33 PM
> Subject: [spacesettlers] Re: Transportation within a habitiat
>
> (...)
> > I don't understand your point. How does the theoretical potential
> > land area that could be produced pertain to the question. Are you
> > saying that the cars will be vacuum capable and will be able to
> > drive between all of the different habitats? Consider that an
Island
> > 3 is most commonly referred to as a 20 KM or 20 mile cylinder.
For
> > most people that will be their universe. I venture the opinion
that
> > given the limited size of the habitats people will want to stress
> > natural vistas rather than roads, noise, traffic lights, parking
> > problems, congestion and vistas of freeways, overpasses, etc.
> >
> I am not sure if Al was thinking of that, but personally I think
that when
> the entire asteroidal resources of the Solar System are consumed,
technology
> for building REALLY large habitats will be old and commonplace.
> Diamond/carbon nanotubes are strong enough to build habitats
hundreds of
> kilometers long - country-sized habitats with a land area larger
than any
> European country. In a scenario like that, I think that a
civilization using
> personal automotive vehicles (or "cars" ;-) would almost certainly
develop.
>

In a scenario like that I would go so far to say "could almost
certainly develop" rather than "would almost certainly develop."

I'm not so sure that we've reached the ultimate level of comfort and
convencience with our car culture. After hundred of years of society
developing in orbit, with constraints not faced on earth, I can't
quite get comfortable with the concept, that they would, when given
the capacity to do so, go back to what we think is the ultimate in
comfort and convenience, and introduce a car culture. But they
COULD. :)

> (...)
> > Or are you saying that we'll be creating aDyson sphre type of
> > structure to house 3 trillion of us in one structure/world?
> >
> A Dyson sphere would be marvelous, but we have neither enough
matter in the
> Solar System nor the gravity-control technology that would be
needed to
> build a full-scale, solid Dyson Sphere.

Yeah, true, but neither can we build a habitat for 3 trillion people
either. :))) So where does that leave our debate?