The difficulty of a given task is modified entirely by the tools available. The right tool assures success and the wrong one simply delays it. Leaving Earth is the most challenging thing that we will ever do. Choosing the wrong set of skills is choosing delay, anxiety and lost opportunity. There is no way to expand human presence beyond earth without a robust tool box of industrial, social, martial and scientific skills all accessible and properly engineered.
Regarding social skills, our master over economic forces is the most tangible of all imaginable knowledge. No other sector of our society has such an immediate and absolute impact in the modern era. We will need the right economy to get to space and we will need to optimize it to stay there.
There is no room for absolutism when it comes to great endeavor. The magnitude of an accomplishment is directly proportional to the acceptance of diversity since it is diversity that spreads the weight of necessity across backgrounds and world views. Economically, absolutism is unacceptable for a society able to maintain itself in space.
Capitalism does not provide the incentive for us to leave Earth. Communism does not provide the resources and socialism tries to compromise but does neither very well. Socialist societies are either bogged down with bureaucracy or autocratic. Instead we will need to let each do what it does best.
The space industry should be socialized. All necessities should be as well. Power, water, food, information networks, education, defense, law, health and habitation all should be provided for. There is no rational market force that determines the cost of these in our world today, only the extortion of fear and desperation. Government needs to be responsible for providing for its people because government is the people. No other interest can accomplish this task.
Capitalism and unregulated markets are the best systems ever devised for distributing luxuries. I cannot imagine any network more capable of delivering what we want to us when and where we want it than the free market capitalist system. Whoever it fails to provide for in necessities, it so over-provides with luxuries that they hardly seem to notice.
Communism is the best system for regulating work environments. In this sense, we currently employ the ethos of communism in modern corporate America to distribute responsibility and accountability. This needs to be expanded to advising and consultation to decision makers to a large extent, and compensation to a slightly lesser extent. Currently, workers are encouraged to believe that their actions are relevant to the success/failure of the company and that they should take ownership of problems in the system and work to correct them. However, they are not to expect similar compensation and input in policy formation to higher ups. The rational is that ability comes at a price and is rare. This is too self serving to be an acceptable reason and needs to be rejected.
Plainly, it is foolish to deny the overwhelming pressure for us to leave our home. Attempts to color space industries a wastes of time and money are so wholly incorrect it is shocking to hear them. Accordingly, we must learn that we cannot dismiss economic ideas that have survived hundreds of years of academic scrutiny. We must accept, inspect, and properly apply any idea that is valid.
There is no greater goal than the continuity of our species; we owe ourselves only that. We need a way beyond Earth. We need a way forward.
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