Theemile wrote:hanuman wrote:Ever heard of organic growth? No matter what number of people would be employed directly in asteroid mining, I think it's a reasonable assumption that they would remain on-site for extended periods of time. It would only be natural for them to want their families close by. The belt habitats would not be mining camps, but full-fledged communities, with everything those communities might require. Moreover, those habitats would have been developing into communities for several centuries. As I said before, Manticore is not 21st century America. It is a multi-planet star nation with a much higher standard of living. Even miners, who we today perceive as the rough living type, would expect far better living conditions than contemporary miners would. Add on several centuries of organic growth and suddenly a belter population of 300 million does not seem beyond imagining.
BTW, a city such as Johannesburg with a population of 5 or 6 million and a still-vibrant mining sector, only employs a few tens of thousands mine workers. the majority of the remaining population doesn't have anything to do with mining at all. I suspect the same is true of the belter population.
hanuman, KZT's point is that the belt cannot ONLY be doing mining. There must be something else there - other jobs NOT just putting bandaids on miners - to support 300 MILLION people. No one is saying that a Miner cannot have a wife and 5 kids, all 4 parents and 8 grandparents living off his income - but even if EVERY Miner lived in such a condition, it still doesn't add up to 300 Million people. There must be more jobs out there -and we don't know what they are - but they are not in shipbuilding or Major manufacturing.
I get his point, and that is exactly what I mean by 'organic growth'. I cannot currently think of an American example of a city that began as a mining centre and remains such, which is why I gave the example of Johannesburg. It began as a gold mining centre and remains such to this day, but only a very small proportion of the total population of the city is directly involved in mining.
As soon as you have a more or less permanent population of miners residing and working in a specific location, that location will begin to attract a non-mining population - first to provide services and goods to the miners themselves, but soon enough you'll see the emergence of service and other industries whose primary customers are not miners, and which are not related to the mining industry at all. Within just a few decades, if that long, the non-miner population will far outnumber the mining population.
My point is that, after several centuries of mining activity in the belts, it's not surprising that the belter population would have grown to the numbers Mr Weber mentioned.
