Well, if you assume that the air recycling will be done by plants, you are going to have a need for a huge biosphere and probably for a lot of oceanic biome. If you plan on having an agriculture, if you plan on having pollinating insects, you are going to need a huge biomass.

You're going to have far more nature than you will have humans.

This setting usually assumes that you have a fast transport network built in the core infrastructure. So being spread out is less of a problem, especially if you have free electricity through solar panel. That means that moving stuff around on electric motor is going to be basically free.

and save room for wild nature.

Arguably space habitat is the ultimate way to achieve that goal on earth :-)

I hate that we live under a mental paradigm that the only thing that matters is efficiency, ad infinitum and ad nauseam.

Take one more step, and you've got it. Efficiency only matters because it maximizes PROFIT, and Profit is all that matters. We are Ferengi, at our core.

So the reason to do it is because uncontrolled, unregulated profit-gouging has made the Earth literally unliveable. We haven't reached that point yet, but we are certainly on that path, and those who would protect us from the inevitable outcome, won't even acknowledge that the problem exists, calling it a hoax, and even forcing their alternative hoax to be governmental dogma.

It seems like those who control the money have already decided that this is our future, so it's perfectly acceptable to destroy this environment, in order to create enough profit to build the next environment, which will be reserved for the Sociopathic Oligarchs.

Everybody will just move around on hover-recliners, like in Wall-E.

Unless they tinted the glass blue I guess but even then you would either have a permanent night or permanent full on solar hyper radiation. Like how would lighting that even work?

Assuming the ring is orbiting the sun, you just tilt the ring a few degrees, depending on the width of the ring. At one point in it's rotation, the sun would be nearly directly below your feet and your part of the ring would be unlighted. At such times, the opposite side of the ring would be in sunlight shining from behind/beneath you. That part of the ring would likely appear as a glowing ribbon across the night sky and provide light like the full moon does on Earth. As the ring rotates you to the day side, the sun would appear to rise from over the edge of the ring wall and shine down on your part of the ring. At noon, the sun would be over head, just a few degrees to one side of the opposite side of the ring, which would likely be invisible in the glare.

Needless to say, the ring base and glass would need to block the most harmful rays of sunlight for that to work.

In what way? I think usually these sort of designs rely on using some as yet undiscovered super strength material to hold them together. Other than that they are just a big Engineering problem. The Physics is sound.

Firing Terbinafine Lasers

aaaand i just learned who i stole that joke from. i'm going to have to thank him.

Seeing such a post upvoted on solarpunk gives me hope.

I don't think the space race and space habitat is the way forward, but there is a future timeline that is sustainable and technologically advanced.

I am happy that some people still believe in it.

The neat thing about them:

First, the pair of habitats can be rolled by operating the cylinders as momentum wheels. If one habitat's rotation is slightly off, the two cylinders will rotate about each other. Once the plane formed by the two axes of rotation is perpendicular in the roll axis to the orbit, then the pair of cylinders can be yawed to aim at the Sun by exerting a force between the two sunward bearings. Pushing the cylinders away from each other will cause both cylinders to gyroscopically precess, and the system will yaw in one direction, while pushing them towards each other will cause yaw in the other direction. The counter-rotating habitats have no net gyroscopic effect, and so this slight precession can continue throughout the habitat's orbit, keeping it aimed at the Sun. This is a novel application of control moment gyroscopes.

From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O'Neill_cylinder

Yea i do see your point there, i just think i was interested enough to want to figure out the puzzle of that place to look past it.

This game has never quite left my mind after i played it, love it.

It spins to create artificial gravity

Not that kind of Flood, Master Chief.