Could all Honorverse humans live in one planet?

It is crazy idea time once more and I've been wondering. What kind of population would constitute real overcrowding for a humanity with Honorverse technology? At which point would population density cause social and environmental problems?

With energy the next best thing to free in the Honorverse and structural materials dirt-cheap, the real limitations are food, and psychology.

Food:
Assuming people don't want to eat hydrocarbons and amino-acids synthesized in bulk from air and water, growing food needs space. Hydroponics can feed roughly 10.000 people per square kilometer without genetic engineering and other monkey business. Assuming people also want meat and other high-taste/low nutrition foods, this probably goes down to 3.000 people per square kilometer or so.

Living space:
At 100 square meters per capita, we got 10.000 people per square kilometer. Since this is higher than the requirements for perpetual food production, we're probably looking at 2.000 people per square kilometer for both food production and habitation in a given space.

Psychological factors:
Countries with more than 200 people per square kilometer are a bit crowded. Those with 400 people per square kilometer are very overcrowded. This number accounts for every facet of life; living space, food production, work, leisure, and open space. Artificial environments tend to exceed such numbers, but we want our population happy and stable, thus 200 people per square kilometer it is.



Building the environment:
Since we don't want to destroy the planet's environment, we decide no more than 1% of its surface should be built over. That's roughly 5.000.000 square kilometers. That would leave us with a population of a mere 1 billion though, so it's cheating time.
Now, we have Honorverse materials which can probably be used to build space elevators even without antigravity, so the tallest free-standing structures could exceed 4000 kilometers. For safety and because designing non-over-engineered buildings is hard, we reduce that by a factor of 100. Our towers won't be exceeding 40 kilometers. Towers because the obvious cheat is to have people live in many layers to increase total population. To simulate a domed town environment, we put the ceilings every 10 meters or so, with a holographic layer simulating the sky on each ceiling, for a total of 4.000 floors.



Total population and planetary environment:
The planet is a sparse forest of titanic habitats towering over all natural terrain. Each such tower is effectively an entire city of 13 million people, with all its industrial, agricultural, and leisure areas enclosed, its citizens living in an environment no more crowded than a domed village. The rest of the planet is all a massive resort its four trillion citizens visit from time to time to admire nature untouched by the hand of man.

Of course, the greatest possible population would be for a Coruscant-like planet-wide metropolis, not this balanced environment. It would have a population in excess of a quadrillion, but a probably much higher criminal and malcontent percentage, resulting in several times more criminals than the entire Honorverse has population.

so the tallest free-standing structures could exceed 4000 kilometers.

You want to increase the effective radius of an earthlike planet, by 66%?

Earth radius is less than 6400km.
So, to the diameter of ~12000km, you add 8000km...

*GIANT PORCUPINES, in SPACE!*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reBzU8E_Ajk


Just kidding, 40km...

Still though, seriously, atmosphere beyond 10km height is very sparse, everything above that altitude might as well be IN space, because effectively, as far as living there is concerned it IS.

You´re basically building space habitats that just happens to be connected to a planet rather than planetary towers.

And i would really hate it every time the elevators didn´t work...

If you want to avoid the issues of pseudo space habitats, you don´t want to go higher than 2-3, at most 4km. Or you will have to have the towers hermetically sealed to avoid people passing out from experiencing pressure differentials by having anything open to the outside. Not to mention potential issues with decompression, if you want standard atmospheric pressure on the inside(which, regularly, you DO want).

Since we don't want to destroy the planet's environment, we decide no more than 1% of its surface should be built over. That's roughly 5.000.000 square kilometers.

That assumes an earthlike planet completely without oceans. That would make for a planet with drastically greater climate differences depending on location(with oceans being the primary heat movers).

Or is the intent to just ignore the terrain?
If you cluster up the towers outside of oceans, you get about three times the land areal used.

Although on Earth, that landmass also includes the Antarctic which is 1/10th of the total land area. It also includes huge areas of land that is of questionable use for building things on it(like a big chunk of Sibiria, maybe 4-5Msqkm of it being tundra unsuitable to build anything large on).

Food can be grown in vertical hydroponic operations, with Honorverse building materials one could make a long block by long block 300+ Stories tall vertical garden with enough food production for millions. Build down 600 - 1200 stories and you multiply it by five. One planet for 10 Trillion would be fine. Crowded but fine. The Shimazu Mega pyramid city was for 1 million people, it is designed for 20th century tech, you could make it for 30 million with Honorverse tech 6 KM tall, with a 4 sided base bump it up to, 50 million. Suspended buildings can be 3 times as tall make it, 100-150 million. 100 of these would fit in New York State. No problem.

http://www.xincailiao.com/uploads/image ... _56098.jpg

No problem.

I think that is overstating it.

DOABLE, yes, sure. The question is whether it´s a good idea.

There´s reasons why population density tend to have a strong link to several negative factors, like crime.

Lord Skimper wrote:Food can be grown in vertical hydroponic operations, with Honorverse building materials one could make a long block by long block 300+ Stories tall vertical garden with enough food production for millions. Build down 600 - 1200 stories and you multiply it by five. One planet for 10 Trillion would be fine. Crowded but fine. The Shimazu Mega pyramid city was for 1 million people, it is designed for 20th century tech, you could make it for 30 million with Honorverse tech 6 KM tall, with a 4 sided base bump it up to, 50 million. Suspended buildings can be 3 times as tall make it, 100-150 million. 100 of these would fit in New York State. No problem.

http://www.xincailiao.com/uploads/image ... _56098.jpg

Crowded is putting it mildly. You'd be better off wishing for Larry Niven's "Ringworld" or a Dyson Sphere.

Belial666 wrote:It is crazy idea time once more and I've been wondering. What kind of population would constitute real overcrowding for a humanity with Honorverse technology? At which point would population density cause social and environmental problems?

You might want to look at Robert Silverberg's early 70's novel "The World Inside".

Silverberg accepted the challenge to depict an Earth where fertility was encouraged, period, and large families were the norm.

His result was the vast majority of the population living in megascrapers where each tower had a population of millions to leave the maximum arable land for food cultivation, and there were a lot of megascrapers. I don't recall how many tens of billions Silverberg postulated as total population, but it was substantial.

For that matter, consider Trantor, the capital planet of the failing galactic empire in the Foundation trilogy. The entire planet was one enormous city, with the output of an assortment of nearby agricultural systems dedicated to keeping it fed.

A population orders of magnitude larger than any core world in the Honorverse supported might be possible but I can't imagine why anyone would try.

Advanced technology reduces population growth, because absent religious reasons, there's no need for it. In pre-technogical eras you had pressure to be fruitful and multiply because you had high levels of child mortality, work was manual labor, and you needed to insure enough hands to do it.

In a technological society, you have the additional factor that kids are expensive, and the determining factor may not be how may you want, but how many you can afford.
______
Dennis

robert132 wrote:

Lord Skimper wrote:Food can be grown in vertical hydroponic operations, with Honorverse building materials one could make a long block by long block 300+ Stories tall vertical garden with enough food production for millions. Build down 600 - 1200 stories and you multiply it by five. One planet for 10 Trillion would be fine. Crowded but fine. The Shimazu Mega pyramid city was for 1 million people, it is designed for 20th century tech, you could make it for 30 million with Honorverse tech 6 KM tall, with a 4 sided base bump it up to, 50 million. Suspended buildings can be 3 times as tall make it, 100-150 million. 100 of these would fit in New York State. No problem.

http://www.xincailiao.com/uploads/image ... _56098.jpg

Crowded is putting it mildly. You'd be better off wishing for Larry Niven's "Ringworld" or a Dyson Sphere.

That wasn't the question, nor was wanting to do this. Could it be? Yes.

Couple of difficulties. The weight of such a tower would probably exceed bedrock's weight bearing strength. I'm too lazy to calculate the tons per sq metre pressure exerted by a 40 km high structure, but it would be significant.
The other is global warming. How much heat would that many humans produce at 80 watts each? That's apart from the highly industrialised process of feeding that many people in those concentrations.