[philwelch]

I mean, a bunch of O’Neill cylinders turns the carrying capacity of our solar system into potentially trillions of people if not more. Turning the entirety of habitable ground into Manhattan is hilariously far off just because we can expand habitable ground pretty damned far.

[tzs]

If we can make enough O'Neill cylinders to handle a trillion (10^15) people, that would buy 440 years at the current grown rate (doubling every 63 years) starting from the current population (7.7 billion).

If we can build enough to handle 1000 times that population, one quadrillion people, that can handle 1000 years of growth.

An upper limit on the number of people we can have without leaving the solar system is about 28 octillion (2.8 x 10^28), obtained by dividing the mass of the sum (1.9891 x 10^30 kg) by the mass of an average human (70 kg).

At the current growth rate, that's 3900 years away.

Indefinite exponential growth can overwhelm pretty much anything.

[meruru]

I think a trillion people can find a solution to that problem in under 440 years.