(Sorry if wrong forum, this looked decent -- please move if needed!)


TWTCS says:
What Our World Needs, Believe It or Not, Is An Industrial Revolution --
Where the Objective Is the Colonization of Space and the Mechanization of Factories.
12/22/2012 "On the day after doomsday, there is a new light"
Whether you have read Hogan's CRADLE OF SATURN, or even Heinlein's FRIDAY with glee, as hundreds of sub-orbital busses blast off from the earth's surface every day and we earthlings have colonized Orion; or you've thumbed seriously through tomes of Frank Herbert's heroes who traverse dusty worlds while staving off invading hordes of spacecraft-riding rivals -- you've come to the same conclusion: something is wrong here on our planet.
With a growing population, there should be a growing economy. With a growing population, hope should grow too. But hope in what? To be more efficient to the point of denying ourselves the things we need to be comfortable? To be meek to the point of giving up our place on earth for someone else? Now you just think for a moment on the idea that space travel should cure overpopulation and lack of resources in one.
to be continued
someone needs coffee
Okay, back!
HOW WOULD THE COMMERCIALIZATION OF SPACE JUMPSTART THE GLOBAL ECONOMY?
FUEL BOOM - "as above, so below". as factories are refitted, and materials moved to new sites, there may well be a huge shipping boom -- and for a little while, fuel prices will rise as new facilities and vehicles are constructed, and workers are moved to new job sites, and people spend their extra money earned on site.
Third world country nationals in particular could benefit from a manned factory or transportation boom. Not everything needs to be automated. Just the high-quality stuff IMO. If people make a decent living knitting socks, let them knit. But if they want to work toward commercialization of space, let them do that instead.
Entire families could be housed with ease if companies provided room and board for the transient workers. In fact, factory towns could become much posher and livelier per square foot than normal towns where people have no focus and are just scraping by to pay bills.
HOUSING BOOM -- as stated above, as factory workers are moved to facilitate mining and spacecraft manufacturing, along with all the other things you'd need to have ready before a large ship could leave orbit, you would need a temporary place to put all these people. Hence the opportunity for green technology and truly sustainable living to get a foot in the door.
Using fuel is not wrong. Using fuel wastefully is very wrong. Housing people is not wrong. Housing people inefficiently can be wrong, in a crowded or deprived world. One of the reasons I hate the rich isn't because they live well: they just don't give a damn when others can't live decently. That's wrong too.
EDUCATION BOOM -- it goes without saying that a mutual effort to settle another planet would very well result in a superior educational system. With space travel as a goal there would be something real to profoundly reach for through education. Sorry if that was worded badly.
I call this the Babel effect, the unified language and scientific bent of the human hive.
Rise of the common tongue -- humans will soon speak a common language. Yet to know if it will be a sign language, musical language, spoken, or a combination of those and symbols.
I think one of the ancient gematria languages makes the most sense, personally. Like Hebrew.
MINING BOOM -- already happening in China and places as far away as Bellevue, WA, where Planetary Resources is aiming to mine asteroids and moons in space. Precious metals have never been more important, or more plentiful, than they are to a culture with access to space. We need them less for circuit boards than for shielding and containment of electric fields thanks to breakthroughs in quantum computing.
CRYSTAL Navigator's COMPUTERS -- a recent update by MIT (read this on PP I think) claims that their labs have found a new state of matter involving the creation of a charged crystal whose electromagnetic properties are in constant flux, enabling for easier quantum entanglement and abstract calculation and list navigation.
SEXUAL and RELIGIOUS IMPERATIVES: relaxed or stressed according to the will of the people or the colony in question.
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