cruggero said:
Earth like planets is what I mean by M-class. I don't know where I got it from. The casimir effect I talked about was along the lines of creating a wormhole, similar to what Einstein had talked about. I've also heard Hawking mention it once or twice. I believe its basic principal is folding the distance between to points and "punching a hole through it".
Like I said it's not a scientific term, sounds like SF. Wormholes are purely speculative physics, whilst interesting they would not help you in your story if you want to keep it as scientific as possible. Firstly they require the generation of exotic matter with negative mass (this may not even be physically possible) which the Casimir effect will not provide, secondly a wormhole doesn't punch a hole through space nor does it fold space. It links two points together but you would still have to drag one wormhole to the required destination. This would involve you having the ability to move objects with black hole like masses.
cruggero said:
But if the planet size cannot sustain the population then why waste a terraforming process on a planet that's;
A.) all ready populated.
B.) running low/out of natural resources.
C.) already fits the conditions necessary for human life?
A) Exactly! It's got billions of people on it already and huge industrial resources. Put it another way, if you are in a city that is falling apart would you rather 1) use your resources and technology to fix the city or 2) send out trucks to the other side of the world costing millions of dollars per kg to try and build a new city there?
B) What natural resources are you talking about? With better technology and efficient recycling there would be no need to run out of anything because you make everything (cars, buildings, clothes etc) out of materials that can be easily recycled.
C) I proposed terraforming because there are areas on Earth that would millions of times more economical to terraform than other planets such as deserts, oceans, mountain ranges etc. Plus you proposed that in your story the Earth was getting polluted, if you have terraforming technology you can easily fix pollution.
cruggero said:
On the matter of efficiency, how can you account for individual consumption? If there isn't enough food and clean water to go around then how do you efficiently supply it? The population would be in upheaval. I understood that our natural resources are finite. Keep in mind too that within the story this isn't happening in the course of a couple decades, it's several centuries. If the population is at 6.5 billion now and was 3 billion 50 years ago then your looking at a x2 increase every 50 years. I know it's not a hard number, but it could go up into the tens of billions at that rate.
Resources are finite but with the technologies necessary for what you are proposing (access to cheap energy orders of magnitude above what the world produces now, industrial output orders of magnitude larger, science far far beyond what we have) you could conceivably build a sustainable, eco-friendly and fully recyclable civilisation. As for population growth the fact that population has expanded so much doesn't mean it will. In developed countries growth has massively stagnated and is declining in some places because A) we don't need kids for work B) we reasonably expect kids to reach adulthood so don't have more to compensate and C) it turns out that equal rights and education for women plus contraception means that they don't spend all their life popping out sprogs for men.
Even with population growth though it would be far easier for your hypothetical civilisation to use their huge industrial power and scientific knowledge to terraform the Earth for maximum population density. If you can build cities in space you can easily build them on and under the sea, there's a hell of a lot of space on Earth. With the technology you are suggesting supporting trillions of people would be easy.
