If today's mentality and "truths" had prevailed in the 1850's, people who tried to go west on the Oregon Trail would have been arrested for child endangerment and trespassing on government-owned land. Wagon train organizers would have been thrown in prison as human traffickers. Heck, if today's mentality had prevailed 500 years ago, The New World would never even have been settled.
I just hope we can start settling space before we create a "smarter planet" where every human behavior is continuously monitored and controlled.
If we don't get off the planet before this happens, space travel will be banned as an unsustainable waste of resources dreamed up by "evil billionaires just trying to make money".
I see a great dark age coming, with a world-governing bureaucracy forcing equality, controlling resources, and defining and mandating cultural norms. The end result will be zero individual freedom, and, finally, universal poverty and dependency.
As Robert Zubrin has said, the vigor of the human race requires a frontier that encourages individualism with individual risk-taking resulting in great individual reward. There is no universal health care or safety net on the frontier. No OSHA. No EPA. No guarantees.
That is the environment where humanity excels and progresses. Without a frontier, freedom cannot endure. To quote Zubrin, "The cops are too close."
If you are currently fighting for large social causes to be managed and enforced by governments (instead of just helping people yourself), you have already lost your true human vigor, and have become effete. You are part of the problem.
"Progressivism," aka socialism, is exactly the same as slavery. It ends in a populace beholden to rulers, totally dependent on "free" handouts, and never able to achieve anything close to its true potential. In a "progressive" society, the government provides, and therefore owns, your food, your medical care, your housing -- everything that is important to life. They can make you dance -- and vote -- anyway they want. There is no incentive to do anything really.
Hopefully the citizen ownership of guns in the US will act as a deterrent to buy us a few more decades of freedom, and allow us to build the new frontier (if we can keep people like Hillary Clinton from gaining power over us).
But the rest of the civilized world is pretty much doomed by their unsustainable "progressive" socialist cultures.
It is a race between progressivism and freedom. Can we reach the new worlds of the new frontier before the cops shut us down?
I have my doubts. We really need to be able to hold off the forces of progressivism for around 50 to 100 years as the technologies advance. During that time, we have to make sure that the billionaires of the space age become trillionaires without governments taking their money away. And the rest of us need to be able to get rich off of it too.
By then the human race will have spread to the moon, Mars, and the asteroids, and will be beyond any control by the degenerate "progressive" residuum on Earth.
If you haven't seen Zubrin's exposition on space settlement and the role of the frontier in the development of American individual freedom, you probably ought to read through it here:
http://www.nss.org/settlement/mars/zubrin-frontier.html
It may be the most inspiring thing I have ever read.
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