How to get to 10 trillion people in this solar system?

Hello Robert,

The amount of space you say is needed by each person seems like a lot at
first glance but then when you think about it, 10000 cubic metres is just a
cube 100 metres a side. Whoops, sorry, my mistake, you wrote feet, I read
metres, lucky we aren't working with a Mars probe :) Okay, 1000 square feet,
a plot 32 feet long (a fraction less but let's keep it simple), and the same
wide, now you add 10 feet up and you have your 10000 cubic feet, it's not a
big space.

How about a hypothetical? An Island Three style habitat, two cylinders
linked at the base as per O'Neil, combined population of 10 million.
Each cylinder has its attended ring or even rings of small pods growing all
the plants needed for food. They use a number of larger pods for growing
meat animals or perhaps the current work into cell culturing succeeded so
that instead of growing a cow, you just grow a vat of cells, only the ones
you want to eat, just to keep things simple.

The habitat is spinning and people are going about their lives so what will
they have to worry about?

It would be safe to assume that all polluting industrial processes will be
performed outside so the only pollution will come from normal living.
Personal transport inside the habitat will be electric so no internal
combustion, sewage will be taken to treatment plants so that is taken care
of, what is left? Run off from watering the garden? The normal spills and
drops of bleach, food scraps, lost cloths, plastic toys, packaging materials
and what have you. There is going to be things that end up where that they
are not supposed to be.

Are there any animals in the main biosphere? Will they have to worry about
birds and "wild" animals fouling the water in any streams or lakes, what
about shedding skin and oils from humans? Will people be allowed to smoke or
cook outside, or even inside for that matter, do they have to worry about
the build-up of aerosols and pollutants in the air from cooking and normal
living?

Sucking in the air from the biosphere and cleaning it should be easy enough
and with filters most particles can be removed. Smoke from nicotine addicts?
The smoke could be treated the same as any other particulate matter but what
about the butts? They have an incredible number of nasty things in them and
just take a look around you in any city street. Putting the butts aside,
what about the other bits of refuse that people generate, today they end up
in the storm water drains, in a habitat the storm water can be treated,
perhaps even robot sweepers will be used.

Will people be allowed to swim in any lakes streams, what about if they have
an accident? Little kids are not going to hold on and run for a toilet, they
will just go but I don't think it will be much of a problem, the fish (if
any) will be doing a much bigger job than the swimmers.

My point about all this is that things that we ignore in our normal life
will not be able to be ignored in a habitat, the dead skin cells you shed,
the oil that washes from you, the waste we all generate, bird and animal
dropping, all the bio matter all take time to break down. Here on Earth we
can let it, the biosphere is big enough that it doesn't matter but will a
habitat be large enough for this and at what size do we have stop worrying
it?

Keeping the air and water clean (but not too clean, that would be a problem)
will need constant work to maintain a clean and healthy biosphere and
personally I think it will be done with a mix of biological systems and
mechanical ones and by bio systems I don't just mean open fields but tanks
of GM organisms busy eating our pollution, their food.

I'd like to know what everyone else thinks will be the way it goes.

Darren

On 9/6/06 3:58 AM, "Robert" wrote: