Obviously, you could plot a graph with the x axis being total human population and the y axis being some amalgam of average human well being. I’m pretty sure it won’t graph as an exponential function, that’s impossible. It would be a bell shaped curve with maximum human happiness occurring at some level and declining in both direction, more population or less.
The population peak, I suspect, will occur at the point of maximum available resources, including energy per capita. And I also suspect that increasing resource availability largely pulls population as opposed to population increase pushing resources.
Total available energy per capita may well be the bottleneck. But there will come a point at which the total resources of a large but closed system cannot continue to increase to match.
There are probably other limits. A future with the average population density on earth being that of Hong Kong, no matter resource availability, would explode.
Maybe we could start hollowing out large asteroids, spin them, and make little worlds. That’s a common SF scenario. Or a Dyson sphere, one of those of radius of the earth’s orbit would give 1.21 x 10^17th square miles of living space.
On a more modest scale, I asked google about Larry Niven’ Ringworld: Larry Niven’s Ringworld is a colossal, artificial structure shaped like a ring encircling a star. It has a diameter of 186 million miles (299 million kilometers) and a width of 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers), Its inner surface area is equivalent to approximately three million Earth-sized planets. And The Earth’s surface area is approximately 196.9 million square miles. My calculations: pi X diameter = circumference–>188,000 miles x 3.1416 = 584,337,600 miles. The area = L x W = 584,337,600 miles x 1,000,000 miles 584.3 with 12 zeros. And the # of earths… Read more »
That’s a lot of space. I’d hate to be the guy in charge of cutting the grass!
Read the entire series. There is a plethora of specialized humanoid species for every purpose. Those Protectors really thought it through.
And the design is crap 🙂 . There are all sorts of instabilities with the shadow rings and other things (like the Spill mountains). It is a 1AU radius 1 Million Mile across kludge. As for the Protectors building it yes there were Pak on it (CF Teela Brown and tree of Life Root). But no PAK would ever put anyone but their descendants on anything they built and certainly not something as dangerous as Kzin with sentient females. Something is screwy here and at least by Ringworld Thrones Niven hadn’t resolved it (though I read that LONG ago so… Read more »
Ehh Ringworld demands several versions of unobtainium to work. Honestly living space is NOT really an issue, especially with the developed world averaging like 1.3 children/woman. You could shove the whole earth population as it exists into Texas even now at New York densities, let alone Singapore or Hong Kong. It looks like asteroid capture and mining could cover many of the the material needs. Really the green revolution has made food not an issue at least other than distribution. Our biggest issue is the masses of <expletive deleted> for brains politicians trying to control all the people because they… Read more »
Back when I was specifying chemical reactor equipment unobtainium was my favorite material of construction. And in some ways we found it! Tantalum has the chemical resistance of glass but an incredibly high melting temperature. The problem was it was incredibly difficult to get in anything but tubes. Nobody wanted to fabricate vessels and heat exchangers out of it. So the costs were ridiculous.