Possibly, but estimates of that number tend to be below 1 billion. The world population is expected to peak around 2050 at 8.7 billion, and decline to 8 billion by 2100. Remember, most of the developed world is already below replacement rate.

The future may involve a lot more biotechnology, which isn't that resource intensive, and a lot less mining, refining, smelting, heavy manufacturing, and long distance transport. That means less of the resources required for space travel.

Did anyone opt out of the class action? If so, they can still sue.

It is patience that is lacking because government only reacts to the "We must do something, this is something, therefore we must do it" tyranny.

Well, not necessarily. Patience is difficult because no one can predict the durations of economic problems, as well as the fact that (as Keynes said) in the long run, we are all dead. We should wait this long? This also does not address the fact that it has never been proven that time actually "fixes" all or even most economic problems. Nor that efficiency (which is about all capitalism promises) is not the only goal of an economic system.

They're kind of dated, because few people do sorts and list manipulation at that level any more. I have both an original edition and a current edition of vols. 1-3, but haven't looked at them in years.

There's about 5,000 years of recorded human history. But there's only about 200 years of industrial civilization. It's been just about 200 years since the first time a paying customer got on a train and went someplace. Think of that as the beginning of large-scale deployment of powered technology.

It wasn't until the middle of the 20th century that human activities started making a big dent in planetary resources. By now, we've extracted and used most of the easy-to-get resources. There's argument over how long it will take to run through what's left, but it's not centuries, and certainly not millennia. More difficult and sparser resources can be extracted, but that's a diminishing-returns thing.

It's quite possible that high-power technological civilization only has a lifespan of a few hundred years before the planet is used up. We might be saved by the Next Big Thing in high-power technology, but there hasn't been a major new energy source in 50 years. Nobody can get fusion to work, and fission is riskier than expected.

Unlikely. As stellar evolution goes, ours is one of the later stars.

The problem with most low-end extruder-type printers is that the engineering sucks. Most 3D printers work by trying to push a string with a gear (which jams or fails to feed), trying to weld a hot thing to a cold thing (which produces weak welds), trying to perform a process that is very temperature-sensitive without air temperature control (which makes the process fail frequently), and trying to weld a plastic that has too high a coefficient of expansion (which causes cracks during cooling).

Some of them then follow up by building a 3-axis motion system out of thin wood (too flexible), and using screw threads and nuts (too much play and backlash) instead of Acme lead screws and recirculating-ball nuts (like real CNC tools.) The end result is miserable process repeatability. This is why a big fraction of hobbyist-level 3D print jobs fail.

HP can probably solve those problems. Many of them are similar to the problems inkjet printers and pen plotters face. HP made both of those technologies work well. It wasn't easy. As one engineer pointed out, intuition fails you when trying to understand what's going on with ink at microdroplet size. HP had to use supercomputers to simulate the fluid dynamics before they got a print head that worked really well. (Of course, most of the engineers who did that were laid off years ago.) Many of the problems with 3D printers are cheaply solveable if you're making hundreds of thousands of them, not hundreds.

There's something like this already working: SailMail. This is email for sailors, using a network of small radio stations around the world that talk to boats and to each other. It's very slow by modern standards; it makes dial-up look fast. It's strictly email, being a store and forward system. But it's a cheap, effective way to get a message to or from a small sailboat in the middle of an ocean. Coverage is worldwide. People have sailed around the globe without losing connectivity.

The guy who set it up is into yacht racing; he won the transatlantic sailing speed record in 2001.

OK, so, I'm a hero warrior with a really big battle axe. There's a flimsy door with a little lock on it...

Yes, locked doors can be useful and interesting parts of game puzzles, but make it believable, please! If your first person character is big, strong and well equipped, and you want to make it credible that he can't get through a door, the door also needs to be big, strong and well equipped.

No, no. Total travel distance is 440m, so it's 220m to max speed of 20m/sec. Assuming constant acceleration (which in practice you don't do because the startup jerk is awful) V=a*t, and d=0.5a*t^2.
d=220m, V=20m/sec.
V/a=t, so d=0.5*a*(V/a)^2
d=0.5*V^2/a
a=0.5*V^2/d
a=0.5*(20m/sec)^2/220m
a=200/220=0.91m/sec^2
1 g = 9.8m/sec^2
a=0.092 G

So it's about a tenth of a g. Riders are going to notice that, but it's not overwhelming.

This is a simplistic analysis. You have to keep jerk (the third derivative) small. The acceleration has to be applied gradually, and reversed gradually half way up. So the peak acceleration is a bit higher than that.

I don't think Obamacare is so powerful that it changed working hours for the poor 3 years before it was written, and 7 years before it went into effect.

Ahh, but you do not see what is obvious to conservatives - that Obamacare is so awful that it's awfulness warps the space-time continuum allowing it to go back in time as far as centuries back to make the world a horrible place. Especially for those horrible people who might use Medicare expansion services (or, as conservatives call them, freeloaders) or might be able to stay on their parent's policy or might not be denied coverage due to pre-existing conditions by fine, upstanding insurance companies (aka "job creators"). Yes, they've made the world a horribly awful place for conservatives. And you don't want to know what the Libertarians think.

No, really, you don't want to know.

It's called your local community college. It will teach you well enough to build anything you need to get through a zombie apocalypse. For more skills and certification, you'll have to find an apprenticeship program somewhere - that's a bit harder.

First, the "Manufacturing Skills Gap" report only comes out once every 5 years or so. The last one is from 2011.

The report says that only 5% of manufacturing jobs are un-filled. It also says that "only 31% of respondent-companies report having formal career development", and that "respondents indicate that access to a highly skilled, flexible workforce is the most important factor in their effectiveness."

So there's the problem. Manufacturing companies are asking for a pool of immediately available ("flexible") employees with specific skills, and less than a third of companies are trying to train their own. Even then, there's only a 5% shortage. They want government to solve the problem for them, instead of putting more money into training or apprenticeships. There's a need for basic shop education, but from the numbers, it's not a big need.

Welding is a very specific skill, learned through practice. It requires some visualization talent; if you can't whittle or freehand sketch, welding is a bad career choice, because hand welding is a precision freehand task. Welding training requires a modest amount of instruction and a lot of practice. If companies want better welders, they can hire beginner welders and train them up. This means a lot of people on the payroll busily burning rod and working up from making angle irons to welding two pipes end to end with a strong, leak-tight joint. (I suck at welding and free-form sheet metal, but can do machining and rectangular sheet metal.)

Don't go thinking that learning trade X or skill set Y or getting credential Z means anyone is set for life.

There are no simple fixes for the current situation where anybody's livelihood(*) can be reduced in value by automation. All the old middle-class certainties like:

- I own a house, which is an asset whose value will only go up
- I have a college degree, which guarantees me a middle-class job
- I have trade labor skills that have been valuable for many years, and will be valuable for the foreseeable future

are no longer certain.

(*) If you're lucky enough to have monetary assets of $500,000+ that you can invest conservatively, and are disciplined enough to live on only the proceeds, you're pretty safe.