In imagining a Kardashev II (K2) civilization, I am giving them a population of 9.5 Trillion people. When your living space is created from having a Dyson Swarm in orbit around your sun this is not a large number of people. It is in some ways a failure of the imaging to have most of your population on planets. The Star Trek universe seems expansive until you look for some population numbers. It would seem the Federation has a population of 985 billion people across 8,000 cubic light years. So, in the space of one solar system it is possible to haven 2 orders of magnitude more people. In Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series they do have a galactic empire consisting of 500 quadrillion people across 25 million planets. So that still works out to 20 billion per planet.
Any time in science fiction especially in media you see massive space infrastructure as hundreds of ships in orbit around a give area. That seems impressive given our level of technology, but where do you take that with a real K2 civilization. I am using just now and example of vacation travel. The society has moved to O’Neil Cylinders set up as their Dyson swarm. The home planet has basically been left to return to nature with now a population of 500 million to a billion people largely as caretakers. It is of course a popular vacation resort. We make the rule that you can only have one billion tourists on the planet at any given time. Using Earth as example we are going to say the average vacation is 10 days. This means Earth gets 36.5 billion tourists a year. That is 100 million per day. What does that look like in terms of orbital traffic? We will use large shuttles of one thousand people each. That is one hundred thousand shuttles per day. We are going to assume shuttles can be turned over in 8 hours. We are going to assume 100 orbital space ports. This means they will have to have docking for 333 ships that are changing out every 8 hours. The busiest airport in the world is Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson Airport (ATL) it has 192 gates and served about 107 million people in 2018. So effectively our space infrastructure looks more like 100 orbital spaceports double the size of the Atlanta airport.
Hartsfield-Jackson also is big enough to have art installations along its concourses and The Plane Train, a subway to get you between terminals. There is also the ATL SkyTrain which is the above ground mover that gets people between the concourses, the rental cars services, and the public transportation system.
Remember we have only put 100 million people a day in orbit. What is the equivalent ground transportation that gets them to the surface? More on that in the next post.