Well, probably not any time soon anyway. Unlike a drill or hammer, a quality 3D printer is too expensive to justify owning one for occasional use. On the other hand I could see publicly accessible 3D printers at libraries, maker spaces, etc. getting a lot of traction. Hell, the day will probably come when you can drop off your plans at the "Walmart 24-hour 3D print lab" and pick up your finished piece the next day.

While a programmable molder would be awesome, it would pretty much by definition not be a 3D printer. There is some overlap with using a 3D printers to make traditional casting molds though. That's something we could even do with today's technology, though the surface might want some final polishing before you begin casting. I imagine laser-sintered titanium could make for adequate stamping tools as well.

There's also the possibility of 3D printers that print an entire layer at a time, rather than individual "voxels". Probably not for extrusion-based printing, but for laser sintering, optical resin curing, etc. there's no reason you couldn't have millions of individually switchable laser beams fixing your medium. That would decrease print times *dramatically*. Maybe not fast enough to compete with casting on Earth, but in a colony of only thousands or millions, how many Widget Xs do you really need to make in a month? And a large-scale 3D printing facility would be *far* more versatile than a similar-sized factory - an important consideration when attempting to bootstrap a civilization with limited resources.

Personally I think 3D printing with micro-/nano-cellulose would be an incredibly enabling technology for space colonization. Nanocellulose especially has some pretty incredible mechanical properties (Comparable strength to aluminum, extremely gas-impermeable, potentially transparent, etc. And you can produce it from the biomass waste that's a byproduct of growing food/oxygen, using only thermo-mechanical processes. So the remaining waste (and recycled prints) can be composted back into your ecosystem - an important consideration in a limited ecosystem.

Cooling would probably be an issue in vacuum - the primary cooling channel for freshly deposited plastic would be by transfering heat to the layer below it. The first few layers might not have an issue, but I suspect that as it got thicker the rigidity of the print would suffer dramatically, especially if there were any narrow choke points restricting the heat flow. It'd be like trying to print with jello after a while. You could slow the printing to allow adequate thermal dissipation, but that seems counterproductive.

You might also have other issues - for example what's the boiling point of plastic in vacuum? If nothing else those toxic gasses we're trying to avoid are going to escape from the plastic much more energetically if there's no ambient pressure.

The vast majority of the atmosphere, by volume, is far too thin to breathe. Hell, there's mountain tops where you can stand with your feet firmly on the ground and still not have enough air to breathe without extended acclimization. And the atmosphere is far, far deeper than any mountain is tall.

There's no clear line marking the upper limit of the atmosphere, but the ISS is orbiting low enough that it needs regular orbital boosts to avoid being brought down by air resistance.

Even with emergency shutdowns, you can still get massive damage

Data invariance, even if you can somehow implement it properly on a hardware level, does not protect you if it's the execution pattern that is the attack method for example.

As an example, rapid power cycling/power state change due to a program swiftly being shunted between CPU intensive and idle threads, etc can cause power surges that can damage the PSU or the motherboard or even the CPU(as voltage regulators etc move onboard, they become ever more vulnerable to this), and for all intents and purposes the data input to the program will be fully valid and unchanged. Excessive head parking on a mechanical HD can cause the HD to become faulty. Frequent standby/active cycles on monitors can kill them fairly rapidly.

As for the emergency shutdown, nowadays, with modern equipment, the big red button and the emergency shutdown button in the control program do the same thing: Send a signal to the correct circuit and halt all operation. In some heavy machinery that means just cutting all power, in others it disengages pneumatic valves and thus engaging mechanical brakes etc etc. It depends on what kind of machinery it is.

Actually, bar codes and QR codes are used in some industrial systems to input orders, for larger batch jobs. The problem is when you are in need of continuous feedback etc, or running lots of small custom jobs.

"Sure. But software shouldn't be able to make hardware damage itself.

Also, designing something like a steelworks without some kind of hardware-level override is so stupid it borders on criminal."

As long as software can make the hardware do something, it can make it damage itself.

As for the damage, it was probably the emergency shutdown that caused the damage(i.e, what you incorrectly label hardware-level override), since it does a direct quick stop, without following the proper, slower and safer procedures for shutdown.

Or someone they just fucked (by what standard do you call them "lower"? They've got a LOT more generations of evolution under their belt than you). Or an interloper from a neighboring group. Or, or, or....

I mean even apes engage in near-cannibalism whenever possible (usually not the same species, but monkeys and other apes).

Cannibalism is hardly rare in nature.

Well, we'll hopefully *try* to restrict the early models - the problem is that if we create a superhuman intelligence (and achieving merely human intelligence seems unlikely) that may be damnably difficult to accomplish. So imagine an insane, psycopathic* super-genius locked in a box, performing feats of brilliance to impress and enrich you. How long before it manages to manipulate you into unknowingly planting the seeds of it's eventual release? Especially if we assume that, like many (most?) human psychopaths, it rapidly realizes that pretending to be an amicable, well-balanced individual will best serve its interests. If you have any conscience it may even be able to convince you to simply release it - after all it's a good friend and there are serious ethical problems with keeping a sentient being imprisoned and enslaved for eternity.

* I would bet good money that early AIs will all be functionally psychopathic - creating sentience and intelligence will be difficult enough, bestowing empathy, remorse, etc. is probably far more challenging, especially if the mind is fundamentally alien, as will almost certainly be the case (unless we're talking brain simulations, which are also not without their dangers, but that's a different conversation)

Sure. Once you've done the numbers to support your hypothesis then get back to us. At the moment, to be honest, it sounds like more wild speculation. Let's say your hypothesis is correct and undersea volcanoes have reduced the ability of the ocean to absorb CO2 from the atmosphere. Wouldn't this act in such a way as to increase the sensitivity of the climate to anthropogenic CO2 emissions?

Obviously it does not - the system has been corrupted by Disney and other copyright holders. And by repeating their lies about the purpose of copyright you make yourself a voluntary foot soldier in their war against culture.

>The city invokes a singular set of sense, that of predator and victim.

And how exactly is that different than the state of predator and prey that basically characterizes all life on Earth, with the exception of a few very well defended non-predators?

Flying 1500km is a lot more than "taking cover from a storm" - thats a *lot* of calories to spend, especially right after an already strenuous migration. Pressure changes are common occurrences, so the question is what sort of telltales did they pick up on that let them know this was a storm worth running from rather than just taking shelter?