I haven't kept up, but from my previous reading a while back, the big FEL lasers are intended for the nuke aircraft carriers. But I could see them being built into a new nuke-powered task force escort destroyer. Put one or two of those on each side of the carrier, and you'd have a pretty strong defensive posture. This would leave the carrier open to send out ground attack and counterforce flights, and the missile destroyers could concentrate on shipping Tomahawks to their delivery point.
The interesting thing for a naval confrontation would be that since lasers are line-of-sight, two such equipped forces could not easily use the lasers directly against each other, at least until one or both sides have used or lost all their planes and missiles (and maybe supercavitating torpedoes), so their opponent could close in for the final burn. So the initial part of an actual naval engagement would still be more-or-less old school projectile warfare.
Agreed. Also, approximately the biggest logistic hassle for the Navy is getting sufficient ammunition, missiles, etc. delivered to a combat ship. The FEL laser, combined with a nuke power plant, essentially provides a nearly unlimited 'ammunition' quantity - and (just like in Star Trek) the nuke power can be divided easily between motive power and fire power, as needed (up to some limit). The logistics is really the big factor. IIRC a big Tomahawk destroyer only carries less than 100 missiles. When those are gone, the destroyer is a lot closer to defenseless than any captain would want to be.
Retroreflector is only going to be 'good enough' in a limited range of frequencies. FEL laser can be tuned to frequencies where the reflectance is poor. (this does make it very useful to know in advance what the reflector(s) are made of)
I can see it now - homeless guys being paid to walk around with a shirt that shows an advertising RSS feed on the back - and snoops everyone who walks by to collect info so the 'system' can send them coupons via their cellphone.
Actually about 1/2 of that was predicted by a futurist at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference in Monterey back in 2002 or thereabouts.
IIRC most/all F1 cars are mid-engine configuration - they have the engine ahead of the rear axle, like the Porsche 914 and unlike all the other Porsches that I know anything about. The Porsche 911 and its relatives have a lot of stuff that's been done to ameliorate the effects of the weight imbalance.
Rear engine cars can start out with understeer (the front wheels being too light to get a grip), then suddenly switch to oversteer (when they finally grip, and the big weight in the back suddenly becomes the end of a pendulum). This can ruin one's whole day.
Mid engine cars generally have very good handling (but can be dicey due to the shorter turning moment - when they break loose they can spin very quickly.) I was told by someone who raced in that class the the 914 had the best handling of any car in the class, but was underpowered.
Also, you're driving with the fuel tank in your lap!
Indeed, you are right. Historically in the US (as I read a long time ago), every reduction in the length of the workweek has been associated with both increased employment and a rise in the economy. Beyond merely hiring more people, it would have a strong effect on tourist and vacation industries. However that was back when the labor economy of the US was largely isolated from the global economy.
In today's global economy we have the fundamental problem that until global producer wages and productivity achieve equilibrium (x $ of labor produce cx $ of goods in any country where c is a global constant), the increase in labor costs can not be managed with increased prices. So for a producer the only alternative is to reduce the work force by automation or offshoring.
I believe that the 'eight or ten guys who run the world' have been working in that direction for several decades, trying to avoid reducing the real standard of living too fast in the 'first world' while allowing the rest of the world to rise up to a middle class standard. Their objective is to avoid a sudden, catastrophic shift and subsequent violence, while allowing technical advances to work their magic on the world. And, so far, it's working reasonably well from their point of view - no riots in the US so far, while much of the rest of the world has achieved a greatly improved standard of living, thanks in large part to the 'WalMart factor' - WalMart alone has brought several million people from dirt poverty to a reasonably middle class level.
I expect that the American worker/consumer will be somewhat dismayed, but not violently so, to find that jobs are returning, but prices for imported goods are much higher, and the swarms of Chinese tourists are 'crowding out the locals by paying too much for everything'! If I were in a position to do so, I would be building a Chinese-oriented resort on the US West Coast with Chinese-speaking hotel help and a variety of Chinese-friendly amenities. (Actually not just Chinese but perhaps all Asian - Chinese, Japanese, Indian, etc.)
In the long term the result of all this will be the approximate stabilization of wages (WRT cost of living and productivity) worldwide, people in the US will no longer be complaining about loss of jobs but about the cost of goods, and then the 'interesting' problem will be the Gini Coefficient - the measure of the inequality of distribution of wealth.
About 30 years ago I came up with the perfect solution to the lack of jobs, and proposed a political party based on my idea - the "Technical Party" - the promise of the Industrial Revolution was that the machines could do all the work, nobody would have to work, and we would all live like kings. To an extent that is already true - few people these days in the US make a living by breaking rocks with a pick. So, the solution is to carry that promise to its logical conclusion - let's make unemployment not the problem, but the goal!
We'll automate everything, and we'll have a kind of 'draft' like the military draft - everyone has to work for, say, five or 10 years, and then can 'retire' and do whatever creative and useful task they feel that they are good at! Of course, just as in the military, a few brave, strong and good souls may want to stay in the service and continue their work, but most of us can just stay home and paint pictures of sailboats.:D
After all, when it gets right down to it, most people aren't _really_ all that thrilled about working - they want a job so they have food, clothing, shelter and TV. So provide a minimum level of subsistence for anyone who want to retire after, say five or ten years. Then those who want to continue in the workforce can be released from the need to always find jobs for people but can truly automate as fast and effectively as possible. Other who want to do something useful could volunteer for cultural projects, beautification projects, volunteering in schools, etc., making the country a better place.
My tongue is at least partly in my cheek. But not all the way.:)
Interestingly, these days blue jeans from Walmart and Costco are better quality than 'name brand' jeans, for example the count of belt loops - good jeans (pants in general) have seven belt loops where most 'name brand' jeans have cut costs by going to five belt loops.
You can also often get 'name brand' stuff at both stores - Carhartt for example - for about 1/2 what the same product costs at the 'work clothes' retailer. Of course this is a particular market niche - not golf wear. And I do sympathise with the local retailer - he/she's at the end of an expensive distribution network.
(replying to self) - according to Wikipedia, the LSI-11 was first used in the 11/03, which was on the Qbus architecture, not the Unibus used by the 11/34. I stand corrected.:)
I don't recall very well, but wasn't the 11/34 the first PDP-11 using the Western Digital mpu chips? The ones that DEC tried to run WD out of business for, so they could buy the company cheaper than the chips?
(Replying to myself, tsk tsk...) Back in the day (late 1970s?) Scientific American dedicated an entire issue to transportation. One of the interesting bits I retained from that was that, throughout history, people have been willing to commute up to about an hour each way. Back when everybody walked, commutes were up to about three to four miles; now folks drive up to an hour (at different speeds according to the roads etc.), and people who drive their own helicopters to work tend to live about an hour's flight from their work.
I just saw some video of a high-tech high-speed track laying system. It's almost entirely automated. Big robots, essentially, built as a series of train units that removes old wooden ties, pushes the gravel bed aside, brings up new concrete ties from a train car farther back in the train, lays the new concrete ties, settles them into the bed, backfills some gravel, sets the new rail down, (two guys set down the clips to connect the rails to the ties), pushes the clips into place, backfills some more gravel, inserts shakers to compact the gravel, then applies and grades the necessary gravel as a continuously moving process. Very impressive. The whole thing moves along at a slow walk, with half a dozen guys monitoring things as they walk alongside.
Truth. No mass transportation system has ever been profitable to my knowledge. (Sure, particular stretches of toll road have sometimes - but even most of them have been "gimme's" handed over after being built with state funds or at least government-backed low-interest bonds. But the state subsidies are (in theory at least) justified by the increased economic activity generated, which generates tax revenue. So in that sense, one could say they are profitable to the state. Transportation systems are also justified by the need for fast communication across the realm for defense and control purposes.
Just a few of the factors, many of which have effects that are poorly understood, and/or have never been successfully modeled:
- height of the cloud
- depth
- density
- water content (related to but different than density)
- comparative amount and type of non-water particles or ingredients
- other cloud layers above or below
- size and shape of the water particles
- ice or water, or both
- movement - affects time over a particular surface location
- humidity of the surrounding air (in three dimensions)
- internal reflection, absorption, refraction, diffraction
- spectrum of the energy coming from all the different directions
- etc.
It's long been accepted that H2O is by a factor of something like 100 the biggest greenhouse gas. Compared to H2O, CO2 effects are tiny. Methane (from termite burps and cow farts, among other things) is also a major contributor. But H2O also turns into clouds, which have both cooling and heating effects depending on many variables, some of which are not well understood. AFAIK, at least until recently none of the climate models successfully accommodated the multiple effects of cloud cover. It will be interesting to see the results of the CLOUD experiment at CERN, which is trying to determine the effect of cosmic rays on clouds at different elevations. If Svensmark is right in his observation that solar activity affects the rate and type of cosmic rays that impact cloud cover in the lower-middle atmosphere, that will greatly advance the ability of science to determine this particular driver of climate.
Science requires lots of faith - at the simplest, faith in things like the permittivity constant. Why should it be that exact value? It's magic. We don't know why. Maybe it's God magic, maybe it's some other magic. There's no determinable reason why it is what it is. There's no determinable reason for the fact that in this Universe, times goes 'forward' and entropy always increases. IIRC it was Penrose who pointed out that it's completely reasonable for entropy to decrease and time to go the other way. Why is 2+2=4?
Then there's faith in the scientific method, and lots of other things.
Atheism requires as much faith as theism. Reconstructability theory and complexity theory show that no constituent within any system (such as the Universe) can ever determine conclusively whether there is an outside controller or not. It is fundamentally impossible, from first principles, to prove or disprove the existence of God. So it's just pride and hubris to look down one's nose at those who believe oppositely to you. For every 'proof' or justification you present, those who disagree have a counter. And vice versa. So be comfortable in your belief, and accept that those others have just as much reason to be comfortable as you.
Which raises an interesting thought, inspired by quantum mechanics - what if both are true? Perhaps "There is a God", and "There is no God", are both true? I think I just bent something!
There was an article in Scientific American (about 2004?) which asserted that we were due to go into another ice age about 5000 years ago, but the advent of farming (clearing land makes for warmer local temperatures) has so far prevented the ice age from settling in. According to the article, the line of difference between the temperature as it is and as it 'should' be fits nicely with the area of land cleared for farming over the last 5000 years. It's an interesting concept and the analysis made sense (possibly unlike this comment!:D ), but I haven't heard it being included in the discussion.
I did a back-of-the-envelope computation a while back to see what it would be like if there were one trillion people. It would not be anything like what we see now, but it could actually work. Many things that we consider essential would be gone - but that is also true of how the earliest explorers to the Americas would think about our present life.
IIRC, population density would average about 14,000 per square mile - about twice the present population of Bangladesh. Of course, that counts deserts, mountains, etc. but does not include expansion into floating systems on the oceans. (The Pacific Ocean alone is more than twice as large as all the landmass combined.)
The energy computations would be quite different but not impossible to contemplate. I don't recall the details, but it would work. The Sun provides a lot of energy, and oddly enough, the more dense the population the less energy each individual needs.
I personally do not like big cities. I grew up in a semi-rural area, and I get uncomfortable in a crowd. But a college friend from China told me that he got nervous any time he _wasn't surrounded by many people! So the people who grew up in that environment would be reasonably adapted to it, and would consider my present lifestyle (outside the range of 4G) something akin to orbiting an asteroid - an alien, scary environment.
So, bottom line - it's all about what gets lost, not what survives. Many species will not survive, many cultures will disappear by absorption. New species will become part of this new very different ecosystem. In the US for example, I could see most if not all present national parks still in existence, but admittance restricted to research personnel, and the borders surrounded by high rise buildings filled with people who eat food grown in a vat (synthetic yogurt?) from recycled waste. I'm not the first to foresee such a high density lifestyle.
Probably the biggest problem will be management of infectious disease, and social disease (such as gang warfare - a kind of localized inflammation in the social body.) Behavior and travel will become increasingly restricted - it may well be a 'hive'-like environment where most people never leave their locale - much like cells in a body. That is what we will have, really, a large 'body' composed of individual humans and integrated organisms, some of which may well be hybrid carbon-silicon entities.
Again IIRC, at present rates of growth it will take 1400 years to achieve 1 trillion people. In that time, we might well have populated near-earth orbital space. That will not move a large number of people off the Earth, but it will provide an outlet for the minds of those who remain. And, since shipping things down from orbit is much cheaper than sending things up, it may be cost effective to grow food in orbital farms (using materials from the asteroids?) and drop it down to the hungry mouths on Earth - in return for up-shipments of hard-to-get minerals, perhaps?)
All of the above is speculative, but the lesson is that every argument about the limits to growth makes critical and false assumptions about the failure of adaptation, technology and social patterns. Life is _very_ adaptive, and in that sense we are life^2. We are replacing classical bio-evolution with social and technical evolution, which will drive bio-evolution. I suggest reading Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon (at Amazon - does/. get paid if we link to Amazon?)
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I haven't kept up, but from my previous reading a while back, the big FEL lasers are intended for the nuke aircraft carriers. But I could see them being built into a new nuke-powered task force escort destroyer. Put one or two of those on each side of the carrier, and you'd have a pretty strong defensive posture. This would leave the carrier open to send out ground attack and counterforce flights, and the missile destroyers could concentrate on shipping Tomahawks to their delivery point.
The interesting thing for a naval confrontation would be that since lasers are line-of-sight, two such equipped forces could not easily use the lasers directly against each other, at least until one or both sides have used or lost all their planes and missiles (and maybe supercavitating torpedoes), so their opponent could close in for the final burn. So the initial part of an actual naval engagement would still be more-or-less old school projectile warfare.
Agreed. Also, approximately the biggest logistic hassle for the Navy is getting sufficient ammunition, missiles, etc. delivered to a combat ship. The FEL laser, combined with a nuke power plant, essentially provides a nearly unlimited 'ammunition' quantity - and (just like in Star Trek) the nuke power can be divided easily between motive power and fire power, as needed (up to some limit). The logistics is really the big factor. IIRC a big Tomahawk destroyer only carries less than 100 missiles. When those are gone, the destroyer is a lot closer to defenseless than any captain would want to be.
Retroreflector is only going to be 'good enough' in a limited range of frequencies. FEL laser can be tuned to frequencies where the reflectance is poor. (this does make it very useful to know in advance what the reflector(s) are made of)
I can see it now - homeless guys being paid to walk around with a shirt that shows an advertising RSS feed on the back - and snoops everyone who walks by to collect info so the 'system' can send them coupons via their cellphone.
Actually about 1/2 of that was predicted by a futurist at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference in Monterey back in 2002 or thereabouts.
IIRC most/all F1 cars are mid-engine configuration - they have the engine ahead of the rear axle, like the Porsche 914 and unlike all the other Porsches that I know anything about. The Porsche 911 and its relatives have a lot of stuff that's been done to ameliorate the effects of the weight imbalance.
Rear engine cars can start out with understeer (the front wheels being too light to get a grip), then suddenly switch to oversteer (when they finally grip, and the big weight in the back suddenly becomes the end of a pendulum). This can ruin one's whole day.
Mid engine cars generally have very good handling (but can be dicey due to the shorter turning moment - when they break loose they can spin very quickly.) I was told by someone who raced in that class the the 914 had the best handling of any car in the class, but was underpowered.
Also, you're driving with the fuel tank in your lap!
Indeed, you are right. Historically in the US (as I read a long time ago), every reduction in the length of the workweek has been associated with both increased employment and a rise in the economy. Beyond merely hiring more people, it would have a strong effect on tourist and vacation industries. However that was back when the labor economy of the US was largely isolated from the global economy.
In today's global economy we have the fundamental problem that until global producer wages and productivity achieve equilibrium (x $ of labor produce cx $ of goods in any country where c is a global constant), the increase in labor costs can not be managed with increased prices. So for a producer the only alternative is to reduce the work force by automation or offshoring.
I believe that the 'eight or ten guys who run the world' have been working in that direction for several decades, trying to avoid reducing the real standard of living too fast in the 'first world' while allowing the rest of the world to rise up to a middle class standard. Their objective is to avoid a sudden, catastrophic shift and subsequent violence, while allowing technical advances to work their magic on the world. And, so far, it's working reasonably well from their point of view - no riots in the US so far, while much of the rest of the world has achieved a greatly improved standard of living, thanks in large part to the 'WalMart factor' - WalMart alone has brought several million people from dirt poverty to a reasonably middle class level.
I expect that the American worker/consumer will be somewhat dismayed, but not violently so, to find that jobs are returning, but prices for imported goods are much higher, and the swarms of Chinese tourists are 'crowding out the locals by paying too much for everything'! If I were in a position to do so, I would be building a Chinese-oriented resort on the US West Coast with Chinese-speaking hotel help and a variety of Chinese-friendly amenities. (Actually not just Chinese but perhaps all Asian - Chinese, Japanese, Indian, etc.)
In the long term the result of all this will be the approximate stabilization of wages (WRT cost of living and productivity) worldwide, people in the US will no longer be complaining about loss of jobs but about the cost of goods, and then the 'interesting' problem will be the Gini Coefficient - the measure of the inequality of distribution of wealth.
About 30 years ago I came up with the perfect solution to the lack of jobs, and proposed a political party based on my idea - the "Technical Party" - the promise of the Industrial Revolution was that the machines could do all the work, nobody would have to work, and we would all live like kings. To an extent that is already true - few people these days in the US make a living by breaking rocks with a pick. So, the solution is to carry that promise to its logical conclusion - let's make unemployment not the problem, but the goal!
We'll automate everything, and we'll have a kind of 'draft' like the military draft - everyone has to work for, say, five or 10 years, and then can 'retire' and do whatever creative and useful task they feel that they are good at! Of course, just as in the military, a few brave, strong and good souls may want to stay in the service and continue their work, but most of us can just stay home and paint pictures of sailboats. :D
After all, when it gets right down to it, most people aren't _really_ all that thrilled about working - they want a job so they have food, clothing, shelter and TV. So provide a minimum level of subsistence for anyone who want to retire after, say five or ten years. Then those who want to continue in the workforce can be released from the need to always find jobs for people but can truly automate as fast and effectively as possible. Other who want to do something useful could volunteer for cultural projects, beautification projects, volunteering in schools, etc., making the country a better place.
My tongue is at least partly in my cheek. But not all the way. :)
Interestingly, these days blue jeans from Walmart and Costco are better quality than 'name brand' jeans, for example the count of belt loops - good jeans (pants in general) have seven belt loops where most 'name brand' jeans have cut costs by going to five belt loops.
You can also often get 'name brand' stuff at both stores - Carhartt for example - for about 1/2 what the same product costs at the 'work clothes' retailer. Of course this is a particular market niche - not golf wear. And I do sympathise with the local retailer - he/she's at the end of an expensive distribution network.
(replying to self) - according to Wikipedia, the LSI-11 was first used in the 11/03, which was on the Qbus architecture, not the Unibus used by the 11/34. I stand corrected. :)
I don't recall very well, but wasn't the 11/34 the first PDP-11 using the Western Digital mpu chips? The ones that DEC tried to run WD out of business for, so they could buy the company cheaper than the chips?
Oblig. XKCD strip.
"So if you see a mote of dust vanish from your vision in a little flash or something, I'm sorry, I must have misplaced a rock."
(Replying to myself, tsk tsk...) Back in the day (late 1970s?) Scientific American dedicated an entire issue to transportation. One of the interesting bits I retained from that was that, throughout history, people have been willing to commute up to about an hour each way. Back when everybody walked, commutes were up to about three to four miles; now folks drive up to an hour (at different speeds according to the roads etc.), and people who drive their own helicopters to work tend to live about an hour's flight from their work.
Excellent info, thanks for the link!
I just saw some video of a high-tech high-speed track laying system. It's almost entirely automated. Big robots, essentially, built as a series of train units that removes old wooden ties, pushes the gravel bed aside, brings up new concrete ties from a train car farther back in the train, lays the new concrete ties, settles them into the bed, backfills some gravel, sets the new rail down, (two guys set down the clips to connect the rails to the ties), pushes the clips into place, backfills some more gravel, inserts shakers to compact the gravel, then applies and grades the necessary gravel as a continuously moving process. Very impressive. The whole thing moves along at a slow walk, with half a dozen guys monitoring things as they walk alongside.
Truth. No mass transportation system has ever been profitable to my knowledge. (Sure, particular stretches of toll road have sometimes - but even most of them have been "gimme's" handed over after being built with state funds or at least government-backed low-interest bonds. But the state subsidies are (in theory at least) justified by the increased economic activity generated, which generates tax revenue. So in that sense, one could say they are profitable to the state. Transportation systems are also justified by the need for fast communication across the realm for defense and control purposes.
What he said. :)
Just a few of the factors, many of which have effects that are poorly understood, and/or have never been successfully modeled:
- height of the cloud
- depth
- density
- water content (related to but different than density)
- comparative amount and type of non-water particles or ingredients
- other cloud layers above or below
- size and shape of the water particles
- ice or water, or both
- movement - affects time over a particular surface location
- humidity of the surrounding air (in three dimensions)
- internal reflection, absorption, refraction, diffraction
- spectrum of the energy coming from all the different directions
- etc.
It's long been accepted that H2O is by a factor of something like 100 the biggest greenhouse gas. Compared to H2O, CO2 effects are tiny. Methane (from termite burps and cow farts, among other things) is also a major contributor. But H2O also turns into clouds, which have both cooling and heating effects depending on many variables, some of which are not well understood. AFAIK, at least until recently none of the climate models successfully accommodated the multiple effects of cloud cover. It will be interesting to see the results of the CLOUD experiment at CERN, which is trying to determine the effect of cosmic rays on clouds at different elevations. If Svensmark is right in his observation that solar activity affects the rate and type of cosmic rays that impact cloud cover in the lower-middle atmosphere, that will greatly advance the ability of science to determine this particular driver of climate.
Science requires lots of faith - at the simplest, faith in things like the permittivity constant. Why should it be that exact value? It's magic. We don't know why. Maybe it's God magic, maybe it's some other magic. There's no determinable reason why it is what it is. There's no determinable reason for the fact that in this Universe, times goes 'forward' and entropy always increases. IIRC it was Penrose who pointed out that it's completely reasonable for entropy to decrease and time to go the other way. Why is 2+2=4?
Then there's faith in the scientific method, and lots of other things.
Atheism requires as much faith as theism. Reconstructability theory and complexity theory show that no constituent within any system (such as the Universe) can ever determine conclusively whether there is an outside controller or not. It is fundamentally impossible, from first principles, to prove or disprove the existence of God. So it's just pride and hubris to look down one's nose at those who believe oppositely to you. For every 'proof' or justification you present, those who disagree have a counter. And vice versa. So be comfortable in your belief, and accept that those others have just as much reason to be comfortable as you.
Which raises an interesting thought, inspired by quantum mechanics - what if both are true? Perhaps "There is a God", and "There is no God", are both true? I think I just bent something!
My take: "Mother Nature eats her young." :D
your "movement", just like race relations in America, has been co-opted by those whose ONLY goal is their own self enrichment
Actually there is another motivation - many of the strongest advocates are using AGWxxxClimate Change as a tool to push their political agenda.
+1
There was an article in Scientific American (about 2004?) which asserted that we were due to go into another ice age about 5000 years ago, but the advent of farming (clearing land makes for warmer local temperatures) has so far prevented the ice age from settling in. According to the article, the line of difference between the temperature as it is and as it 'should' be fits nicely with the area of land cleared for farming over the last 5000 years. It's an interesting concept and the analysis made sense (possibly unlike this comment! :D ), but I haven't heard it being included in the discussion.
Au contraire, see Svensmark et al. Also see "Washington Crossing the Delaware" toward the end of the last Maunder Minimum.
To tell the truth, I'd be happier with that scenario. But it wouldn't fit well with the SF novel I've been working on in my head! :D
I did a back-of-the-envelope computation a while back to see what it would be like if there were one trillion people. It would not be anything like what we see now, but it could actually work. Many things that we consider essential would be gone - but that is also true of how the earliest explorers to the Americas would think about our present life.
IIRC, population density would average about 14,000 per square mile - about twice the present population of Bangladesh. Of course, that counts deserts, mountains, etc. but does not include expansion into floating systems on the oceans. (The Pacific Ocean alone is more than twice as large as all the landmass combined.)
The energy computations would be quite different but not impossible to contemplate. I don't recall the details, but it would work. The Sun provides a lot of energy, and oddly enough, the more dense the population the less energy each individual needs.
I personally do not like big cities. I grew up in a semi-rural area, and I get uncomfortable in a crowd. But a college friend from China told me that he got nervous any time he _wasn't surrounded by many people! So the people who grew up in that environment would be reasonably adapted to it, and would consider my present lifestyle (outside the range of 4G) something akin to orbiting an asteroid - an alien, scary environment.
So, bottom line - it's all about what gets lost, not what survives. Many species will not survive, many cultures will disappear by absorption. New species will become part of this new very different ecosystem. In the US for example, I could see most if not all present national parks still in existence, but admittance restricted to research personnel, and the borders surrounded by high rise buildings filled with people who eat food grown in a vat (synthetic yogurt?) from recycled waste. I'm not the first to foresee such a high density lifestyle.
Probably the biggest problem will be management of infectious disease, and social disease (such as gang warfare - a kind of localized inflammation in the social body.) Behavior and travel will become increasingly restricted - it may well be a 'hive'-like environment where most people never leave their locale - much like cells in a body. That is what we will have, really, a large 'body' composed of individual humans and integrated organisms, some of which may well be hybrid carbon-silicon entities.
Again IIRC, at present rates of growth it will take 1400 years to achieve 1 trillion people. In that time, we might well have populated near-earth orbital space. That will not move a large number of people off the Earth, but it will provide an outlet for the minds of those who remain. And, since shipping things down from orbit is much cheaper than sending things up, it may be cost effective to grow food in orbital farms (using materials from the asteroids?) and drop it down to the hungry mouths on Earth - in return for up-shipments of hard-to-get minerals, perhaps?)
All of the above is speculative, but the lesson is that every argument about the limits to growth makes critical and false assumptions about the failure of adaptation, technology and social patterns. Life is _very_ adaptive, and in that sense we are life^2. We are replacing classical bio-evolution with social and technical evolution, which will drive bio-evolution. I suggest reading Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon (at Amazon - does /. get paid if we link to Amazon?)