Comment Re:Not a problem... (Score 5, Interesting) 326
That assumes that all those environments are pointless wastes of space, unfortunately that premise isn't true- those areas of land serve important purpose for example the sands of the Sahara blow across the Atlantic and fertilise the likes of the Amazon rainforest.
A lot of people say "Why don't we geo-engineer the Sahara to make it tropical forest again!" but it becomes almost a zero-sum game, as you grow forests in Africa you decrease the fertilisation of the Amazon and so growth is stunted there in turn.
We can only move into these territories (or even keep expanding in existing ones) if we can find a way to do so without impacting the underlying ecosystem, otherwise we find ourselves with a whole lot of people and not enough resources and you know what that generally means? war - winning side gets the resources.
So it's not just about making an area habitable, or comfortable, it's about doing so in a manner that doesn't have a knock on effect elsewhere - by regrowing Africa into a tropical jungle paradise you'd be slowly pushing ever more of South America into a poor inhospitable desert. Similarly if you start inhabiting Siberia and Antarctica with more human activity resulting in greater melting of these regions you'll simply be flooding coastal regions elsewhere and making them uninhabitable.
Long story short, you cannot make massive changes to large areas of land without there being an impact elsewhere. You can see this on many scales, whether it's the farmers that cleared the forests on the hills of South West England to give themselves more land for crops leading to widespread devastating flooding due to lack of trees to slow water down in the hills, or whether it's something much larger scale as with the Africa/Amazon connection above. For every sizeable environmental change we make there is an impact elsewhere.
For what it's worth, I suspect the place we could most likely inhabit on land with the least impact elsewhere is in parts of the sea but even this would require a lot of care so as to restrict ocean pollution from waste which may damage fish stocks and decrease food. Failing that it's to space we go I guess.
Which isn't to say that there aren't some areas of the planet we can inhabit with little impact elsewhere meaning there is some scope for population growth, but those areas are becoming ever less common and the effects of inhabiting them elsewhere are often subtle making it difficult to know when you have and haven't found a reasonable spot to settle more people. Thus fundamentally it's not simply a case of saying "Hey look that place isn't inhabited, let's inhabit it!" because in doing so you're causing destruction of environments elsewhere where people were inhabiting and now you have to find room for them too.
Of course, I suspect none of it will matter- the rich will live where they desire to live and any knock on impact on anyone else? well they can go fuck themselves, because humans are an inherently selfish species.