>>33842473
>once the industrial age is over
It will never be over. Each year we find ways to do more with the same amount of resources For example, I can comparison shop, pick a product and order it in a 2-3 minutes thanks to the Internet. I can remember when I would have to spend hours walking around stores or hunting through thick paper catalogues to find stuff. We will soon (actually, already do) have factories and warehouses that are largely robotic. The cost of getting to orbit is a tiny fraction what it was 30 years ago. That leads on to the availability of literally unlimited raw materials and energy in our solar system. The hunt for exoplanets becomes more efficient each year with better instruments. We will soon have a ranked list of Earth-like planets within a few tens of light years. It is estimated that 20-50% of stars have at least one rocky planet in their habitable zone. That would be dozens that could be reached within a human lifetime, travelling at, say, 0.5c. But space habitats will be able to support trillions of people just within the solar system, many times the living space of earth, even if we never get to the other stars (but realistically, small probes can be accelerated up to that speed with near-term technology such as space lasers. The turn around time until their data of what they find as they fly though an alien system would get back to us within a century.

And don't get me started on life-extension, having almost forever to find love and fulfilment...

>>33244021
My point being that when goods and services get cheaper then people buy more of them. If corrective eye surgery gets cheaper then more people will have it done. There will be AIs that replace hair one follicle at a time, inspect and fix tissues one cell at a time, supervised by the thousands by one human surgeon. As building and landscaping gets cheaper, the price of space habitats will come down and everyone will have to have one.