...And We Will Have Snow

Chapter 2-7: The Dream

After Tengri's talk about his vision for them all, his little group with their special gift inevitably began referring to themselves as the 'dream team.' As they began their analysis of the optimum size for the self-contained living units, they needed a handy way to refer to that as well. For a while it was just a 'unit,' but someone remembered that Dema had called the farm part 'Gaia in a bottle' and liked that better. That was too cumbersome though, so 'Gaia unit' was tried, then 'micro-Gaia' or just 'micro-G.' But before long it was just 'the farm' for the central food-producing system, and 'the bottle' for the whole closed community. That stuck.

Marian had concluded that each farm could ideally support about a thousand people. She got the job of reporting to the group on what that meant. Since she wanted to use visuals, they gathered in the conference room.

"According to our analysis, social statistics indicate that an ideal size for a community is ten to fifteen thousand people. Even in big cities, people tend to divide up into about that size of wards or precincts as the natural political unit. So an ideal community would comprise ten to fifteen bottles. Communities as small as one bottle could be viably self-sufficient. Below that some economies of scale would be lost, as is the case here on the island; some products of the system would be recycled without involving human consumption.

"The ideal size per bottle with its farm and associated living space would be about an eighth of a mile across, roughly the size of two city blocks side by side." She had a slide for this, showing the farm surrounded by apartments.

"So a fifteen bottle community would occupy about four square miles, roughly two miles square or a little over two miles in diameter." She had a slide for this too.

"Now, some estimates expect the global population to stabilize at ten billion if current trends continue. I don't imagine that the whole human population will end up in bottles, but if they do that would take about ten million bottles. Just for comparison, there are about a billion cars in the world today, and about an equal number of family dwellings." She brought up another slide.

Karen said, "That makes it look like putting people in bottles could reduce the human footprint on the planet over a thousand times!"

Marian had a cartoony slide for this that made everyone laugh. "Probably true, but not likely to happen," she said.

Cheryl said, "What if the population doesn't stabilize?"

Marian grinned and said, "I'm glad you asked. One estimate is that earth has 12 million square miles of arable land, land suitable for conventional farming. At the rate of 4000 people per square mile, the arable land surface could support 48 billion people. So there's room for a lot of growth, especially since much of the 57 million square miles of land considered non-arable would be suitable for bottles.

"In fact, considering that the aquaponics farming component requires no arable land at all, a sizable fraction of that 57 million could prove suitable. Then again, the ocean area is about 140 million square miles, so floating bottles could accommodate another 500 billion people or so—if it was all used that way!" Her slide for this was pretty funny too.

"And it might prove preferable in some areas to submerge the bottles, requiring no surface area at all. Similarly, land bottles could be subterranean, again recovering surface area." Her slide for this made the whole Earth look uninhabited.

"But there's really no reason to doubt the ten billion figure. It seems like a natural limit when survival challenges are removed. And the sorts of challenges we may be facing are likely to reduce numbers, not increase them. So it will be more a matter of where people choose to live when given the opportunity our bottles represent."

"Tell us about the animals," said Karen.

"Wild or domestic?"

"Oh, domestic. We'll let the wild ones take care of themselves, right?"

"Well, it's very important to understand that all this depends on computer monitoring of what goes on in the farms, so the system is maintained in optimum operation. That includes the animals. Fish can be implanted with an RFID chip that monitors their location and growth. Then they can be automatically selected for harvesting when they reach a certain size. Likewise chickens can be tagged and tracked, so the computer will know where they lay their eggs. They can be harvested for meat when they stop laying. We even factored in Cheryl's pigs. Goats could serve the same purpose, they'll eat just about anything too. And it's more practical to milk goats than pigs, although pigs could be genetically modified for milk production.

"Any questions?"

Everyone applauded. Tengri pronounced himself well pleased with the presentation, and said he wanted to make it part of the virtual tour. Ray said he had it all taped, and could program the virtual Marian to deliver it. Then Marian could redub anything she wanted to change. Marian was thrilled.