Hard balls gas and Alexandrov spaces of curvature bounded above.
We introduce a notion of Hilbertian n-volume in metric spaces with Besicovitch-type inequalities built-in into the definitions. The present Part 1 of the article is, for the most part, dedicated to the reformulation of known results in our terms with proofs being reduced to (almost) pure tautologies. If there is any novelty in the paper, this is in forging certain terminology which, ultimately, may turn useful in an Alexandrov kind of approach to singular spaces with positive scalar curvature [Gromov...