On 9/4/22 13:50, Jonathan Clark - jonathan at att.net (via tml list) wrote:
> Alex Goodwin (and others) wrote:
>
> Actually both Asimov's Trantor and Niven's Puppeteer Worlds came to my
> mind while
> I was writing, but planet-moving is outside Traveller tech limits.
> Trantor is
> possible, but again, where do the food and water come from?
IIRC, towards the end of the Galactic Empire / rise of the First
Crustacean, it was starlifted.  All of it.
> <snip> Asimov's numbers for
> Trantor may well just reflect 1950s tech limits, and also that the
> Foundation
> series is Space Opera, not hard SF :-)

Or Trantor is a significantly smaller rock than Terra, since, IIRC,
Golden Age Terra had at least as many yammerheads as Trantor at its peak
did.

Golden Age Capital has even more yammerheads (60B vs 40B), on a world
only 5k miles in radius (against Terra's 8k).  Again, this neglects
orbital infrastructure.

>
> Alex, your examples of Macau are illuminating, but I would like to
> explore the
> ecological footprint of the island a bit more. OK, it's on an ocean,
> so with
> sufficient power and a bit of handwaving the water supply can be
> covered, but
> where does the food supply come from? (I stress that I simply do not
> know the
> answer to this question.) If it takes eg 1K km^3 to supply food to the
> island,
> then that area should get added to its 'effective' surface area (of about
> 120 km^3, I think).

I see where you're going, and am curious to see what effect that will
have on mean population densities.

I was using Macau as an example of "how built up can we get with current
tech", and will note I was using _area_, not _volume_.

>
> Like I said, I think that building tower blocks higher than ~3KM is
> going to get
> problematic, unless you are going to pressurize them, or go with genetic
> modifications to the inhabitants. I suggest that the Vilani, with
> their well-known
> aversion to anything high-risk, would not be happy with pressurized
> blocks.

As others have said, what is "high risk" after at least three millennia
of careful, iterative, improvement?

Cleaning the windows would get interesting, nearly requiring pressure
suits above 10 km.

<snip>

Alex