Elimination of death as a physical condition might be attainable and with that scientific advance, those lucky to be alive have unlimited time.

Accidents still occur, children still are created. Just a new set of problems to solve when lifespans become unlimited and capitalism fails or succeeds because of this new advance of unlimited lifespan when, not if it occurs.

I find it a bit sad that our society responds positively to a “new” concept only when big money gets involved.

As Hemaclitus (“The Weeping Philosopher”) said: “Panta Rhei” (In English: All things flow). I believe the best form of existence is not to attempt ot change the flow, but to learn to live with it.

Imagine manipulating individual strings and combine them, or reconfigure them in other ways, into intelligent computing structures.
But, to get to that small a scale, we need to first build the nano-computers (in the scale of 10^-9 meter), followed by the femto-computers (in the scale of 10^-15 meter), atto-computers (in the scale of 10^-18 meter) and eventually Planck-computers (in the scale of 10^-35 meter).
http://profhugodegaris.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/femtotech.pdf

Now, to accelerate the progress toward the creation of Artilects, Prof de Garis is posting *free* courses on Youtube.
All Cosmists please attend his courses.

From Human Body 2.0 (as Kurzweil said in his books) to Earth 2.0.
And, eventually, Milky Way Galaxy 2.0 and Universe 2.0.
(Eliezer Yudkowsky suggested to name our Universe, to distinguish it from other possibly existing universes, “Socrates”. I wonder how many people agree on that.)

Cheap to get small stuff UP the ladder, if you have a tug up there for the last stretch. Look at TekLaunch.

Robots will do a lot, but they have a hard time opening things to refill. Gonna have to put some folks up there.

Gold and other PGM are fantastic as manufacturing goods, and will only increase in demand to absorb availability. They also become fabulous powders for 3D printing, and in the post work world , there will be a lot of jewelery makers. Iridium coatings on any bearing makes it 100 times better, and indium can store solar energy directly by just setting it in the sun.

there will be demand, why are we going to let corporations control it ?

But the rich often look only as far as the next quarterly report. They have been destroying the world for a long time, just to achieve their short-term goals. They always miss the boat when the next big thing comes along and then some new guy becomes the next billionaire.

This is going to happen in 30 or 40 years when some grad students and their instructor quit the university to found a start-up to design the self-assembling, photovoltaic, carbon nanocells that I always talk about. The people to do this might even be people from Third World countries who educate themselves with online courses. They will start from scratch and give the world the technology of abundance that will drive Exxon Mobil out of business.

When people have the means to use the power of the sun to take carbon dioxide out of the air and spin it into carbon nanotubes and graphene and all the other useful carbon compounds using the elements found in the air and soil, they will grow all their food, shelter, clothing and transportation at home in desert homesteads.

Graphene has been found to filter salt out of seawater through reverse osmosis. Great desalination plants can be grown out upon the continental shelves where they are beyond the horizon and can’t ruin the view for people with seafront vistas. The water will be brought in to the deserts by pipelines grown from carbon nanotubes.

At the same time, carbonaceous asteroids will be towed in to geosynchronous orbits where the same carbon nanocells can grow long, wide cables of perfect carbon nanotubes to lower down to anchor points along the equator.

Millions of people will be able to take space elevators up to habitats and interplanetary spacecraft to shuttle them out to the Lagrange Points where starships using charged particle accelerators as drives, many orders of magnitude larger than the Large Hadron Accelerator will be built.

These ships will use fusion power to run their charged particle accelerators that will be fueled by interstellar hydrogen.

These Bussard ramscoops will have giant radars and powerful lasers lining the rims of their scoops to spot and vaporize all the bits of dust and ice and rock that lie before them as they accelerate at one gravity for years on end.

You only need to accelerate for a little over a year to get up near the speed of light. Once you achieve that velocity, time will slow down for you and you can take all the time you want to go as far as you want, circling the galaxy. (Just stay in the central beltway of the galactic suburbs. There are too many giant stars shooting out gamma ray bursts in the hub and the stars out in the periphery are lacking in metallicity, so Asimov’s stories of Trantnor and the Foundation will need to be set elsewhere.)

Another thing, a starship can carry one of a set of mated wormholes, leaving one on Earth. This will allow instantaneous transportation from home to the ship. People will be able to walk through a doorway to the stars. Heinlein wrote that story back in the 1950s.

And now it is all going to come true.

But only if we get through the coming robot apocalypse.

If the robots that put people out of work don’t continue paying the Unemployment Insurance and Social Security taxes that the workers were paying before they were kicked to the curb, then society will collapse and we will enter a barbarous era ruled by survivalist militia warlords.

Of course, NRA President LaPierre will be one of these warlords, (he has all those guns).

Now there is free education, which is great.
Please support Prof Hugo de Garis’ online courses on Math/Physics/ComputerScience on YouTube.
Some of his videos (posted late 2012) have only 1-2 views which is horrible. Please take his FREE course, and (if you can) donate to him.

Disclaimer: I am just a Prof de Garis’ fan.

If they really do launch their Fireflies in 2020, it could take two years for them to catch up to their targets and report back.

If DSI is ready and waiting then, they can launch the DragonFlies to intercept and return in four years.

Robots are going to be very, very good by the year 2026. By then they will be capable of any job a human can do.

They will have 3-D printers on asteroids by 2028, making rocket engines and rocket fuel and spacecraft.

I want to live to see this, so I’m going to have to give up eating potato chips.

But as strong as carbon nanotubes are, I’m afraid that they just might burn, so rocket engines will need to be made from the nickel-iron asteroids.

So the hard part for the first robot miner/manufactory will be to use an ion drive to catch up to a carbonaceous asteroid, while carrying along rocket engines to burn hydrogen and oxygen. Then it can fuel itself after it gets there and push that asteroid along to meet a nickel-iron asteroid where it can make rocket engines for a spacecraft made of carbon nanotubes.

It will take some time to get up to that point, but after that, things will develop according to the law of accelerating returns. It will take a decade or two of small progress to get started, then suddenly it will seem as if the solar system is overloaded with robots in spacecraft on their way to intercept more and more asteroids.

Even before the space elevator is built, the robots can make landing capsules out of the rare metals and weave carbon-fiber parachutes to drop them in Area 51 (or some spot just outside of Las Vegas or Denver).
(I mention Denver because the U.S. Treasury has a mint there. Once a capsule made of platinum is landed outside of town, they can start to mint those trillion dollar coins of platinum that were in the news recently.) (And I mention Las Vegas because they will come up with new slot machines for those trillion dollar coins.) (But then again, that casino tycoon, Sheldon Adelson, will start building gambling halls in the habitats at L4 and L5.)