[kiba]

These resources are abundantly available on Earth and endlessly recyclable. It's a question of economics, energy production, and negative externality.

At some point, your problem will be heat, not energy, because roughly speaking humans are 100 watts space heater, never mind all the heat generated from making food, transport infrastructure, industrial production and extraction.

If you take a look at cities and how they're constructed, it's really a 2.5D map. The road corridor are frequently ground level, maybe two or threes. Then we build towers and buildings. So what we created are artificial canyons in cities, but we don't build entire floor of cities.

So, let say that you have a square kilometer area. If you add a floor of space, congratulation, you just doubled the amount of space in an area.

So in that sense, space isn't probably an issue.

Humans are actually pretty space efficient. What's not space efficient is all the expensive infrastructures such as cars and roads.

What will be the most challenging for us is really political, not engineering or economics or space or energy.

[kelnos]

> It's a question of economics, energy production, and negative externality.

And we're doing a pretty poor job at solving those problems today, for many people at the lower end of the wealth & income spectrum. What makes you think adding more people will magically fix those issues?

I don't think anyone is arguing that it's technically impossible to fix issues like this and have a much larger population, with everyone housed, clothed, fed, and even more than that, happy. But humans -- especially those with wealth and power -- are a selfish bunch, and we are pretty bad at sharing when the goal is to raise other people up.

I mean, we could ensure that not a single person on Earth went hungry. We could do that today, with our level of food production technology. But we don't, because we don't like the economics of it. We could swallow it and do it anyway, but we refuse to.

The continued comfort and wealth of the haves will always be a priority, at the expense of the have-nots. Eventual post-scarcity increasingly feels like a pipe dream to me.

> So, let say that you have a square kilometer area. If you add a floor of space, congratulation, you just doubled the amount of space in an area.

That's just another way to create inequity. Would suck to live on anything but the top level, without sunlight in your home. Sure, maybe it's possible to get sunlight to everyone's home, but let's not pretend that would actually happen, out of the generosity of every builder's heart.

[kiba]

I mean, we could ensure that not a single person on Earth went hungry. We could do that today, with our level of food production technology. But we don't, because we don't like the economics of it. We could swallow it and do it anyway, but we refuse to.

It's really not a problem of economics. It's entirely a political problem.

That's just another way to create inequity. Would suck to live on anything but the top level, without sunlight in your home. Sure, maybe it's possible to get sunlight to everyone's home, but let's not pretend that would actually happen, out of the generosity of every builder's heart.

Not everybody care for natural sunlight. I certainly don't. Moreover, I see sunlight hitting the roof of my non-solar paneled house as uselessly bouncing and heating things up unnecessarily. Just another resources to be used and transformed into something more our liking.

If you're talking about open space for a sufficient definition of open space floor plan, then it's a question of engineering.