Hopefully after lying fallow for a few years, a back-to-basics series based on hard science fiction stories by actual science fiction authors will be more successful. And of course, back to Roddenberry's original vision of a future in which everyone is at peace with who they are and who everyone else is, in which everyone has enough resources that the lower-level needs of Maslow's hierarchy are covered, so everyone's time and effort can be spent on self-actualizing, fun activities like exploring the galaxy.

If an AI's shape is is based on an ideal human form, it will look similar to many actors and actresses who are popular because they also approach ideality. Now, ideality is to some extent a cultural artifact, changing slightly as the decades go by, but always constrained by human physiology. Can an actor whose popularity has influenced the ideal be said to own some aspect of ideality? For how long?

There's also the issue of personal style, how someone moves and speaks, which is the basis of caricature and mimicry. When an actor or comedian acts like someone else, they're epitomizing recognizable aspects of the original's style. To the extent that such a style is recognizable, should it be possible to copyright it? And if a performance is informed by one or more actors' styles at a sub-recognizable level, is copyright still violated? That is to say, is it recognition or communicative effectiveness that's being copyrighted?

Yes, however the cost of solar, batteries and smart grid infrastructure are declining exponentially, so you have to keep re-doing the comparison every so often. One could start with just solar, which in India might be valuable on its own to run an air conditioner during the hottest part of the day. Then add a little battery so you can charge your cell phone all night. Then a few years later get a bigger battery and run a refrigerator all night, and so on.

Under current conditions, a large chunk of the human population is failing to breed. Ergo, the children of the ones who do breed will inherit their parents' fitness for current conditions, and a more sparsely-populated world to live in.

A slightly hopeful sign may be that the shift to remote work enables extended families to gather in one affordable place at some distance from downtown, while also allowing one or both parents to parent between Zoom calls.

I bet if you added up the fractions of houses that "owners" own versus the large chunks of most houses owned by banks and other creditors, home ownership has actually fallen, and been time-shifted a decade or two later in most people's lives. Feelings about the future matter when prospective parents are deciding whether now is a good time to have a kid. If you've got a huge mortgage hanging over your head that might go underwater based on factors you can't control, perhaps you don't breed right now.
Also, although most people can eventually scrape together enough to buy a house, the average house they get will be smaller than in previous decades. There's a multimodal thing going on right now with the housing stock, with McMansions for some but also lots of teeny townhouses.

And yet a guy could get a factory job out of high school, get married in his twenties and afford a three bedroom house, a car and annual vacations at Disneyworld on one income. (The Flintstones, e.g., is an important documentary record of lost prosperity.)

Let's try returning housing and employment conditions to 1950's levels and see what happens. Whether or not people have more kids, it'll be a popular move.

In terms of overall energy system cost, the sweet spot is probably to get most of the primary energy from solar and wind, with lots of long distance cables, demand response (and other smart grid approaches) and a little storage, being sure to include any existing power dams in the storage network. Nuclear costs too much and takes too long to build compared with achieving the same overall system reliability with renewables + storage + networking etc. If cables are currently expensive, copper miners will probably step up and in ten years or so there'll be a glut of copper on the market.

It's not about caring or optics, it's about cost efficiency. Renewables are the cheapest way to provide electricity, so that's what they're building.

Although, as you say, it would take a lot of nukes to warm the oceans directly, a very few large nukes (perhaps as few as twenty, I read somewhere) might produce a nuclear winter effect that would noticeably cool the planet and impair agriculture. There are lots of climate engineering approaches that are less destructive, of course.

You're right that medical care is free here in Canada, but it can require time, experience and energy to achieve desirable outcomes. Doctors and nurses here are on the whole competent and caring, but the system can be bureaucratic and in-demand procedures often have long wait times. Some high-cost treatments aren't covered under provincial health plans. None of this is to say that assisted suicide should be restricted "until wait times improve". If you let the anti-assisted-dying types decide when the system is good enough for people to make their own decisions, the answer will be never.

As solar + wind + storage + long distance transmission + demand response ramp up, electricity will become cheap. The biggest cost will be paying off and decommissioning stranded fossil and nuclear assets. Over the coming decades energy uses that currently make no sense because of the high cost of energy will become feasible, e.g. garbage mining, large scale seawater desalination, effective recycling, cheaper manufacturing, higher energy mining processes to get the most out of low-grade ores, sucking excess CO2 out of the air and burying it, etc etc. Houses cost a lot? Building and servicing new towns becomes affordable when energy is cheap. Birth rates should begin to recover within the next ten or twenty years.

A good way to move past the base load concept is to overbuild renewables to a point where, between networking, storage and a very large capacity, there's always going to be enough power for critical needs. This means that most of the time there will be lots of extra power, and this can dispatched (via a demand response system) to uses that aren't time sensitive like smelting aluminum and generating green hydrogen. Because renewables are cheap the combined PV + wind + storage + transmission + dispatch system will cost less and can be built faster than anything involving nuclear, which always costs at least three times the agreed price.

As solar + wind + long distance transmission + storage ramps up, electricity will become progressively cheaper. It'll then take a while to electrify a widening range of industrial machinery and processes, but ultimately the cost of everything will go down, as will the cost of transporting everything to where we want it to be.

This is encouraging, as an economy is a mechanism that turns energy, raw materials and human attention into goods and services that people want. Cheap energy makes it easier to obtain, transport and process raw materials. Hopefully we'll experience a return to 1950's levels of per-capita energy availability, when it was possible for a single-income middle class family to afford a new three- or four-bedroom house and all its infrastructure.