In article ,
TKalbfus wrote:
Why wait for the rest of the world to fix its problems?

I've no idea what you're talking about. What do you mean, "wait"?


The World's problems are one of the motivations for travelling in space in the
first place, that is to get away from them. If we solve all the world's
problems we have no reason to leave Earth! Lets take a few examples:

Overcrowding: If we solve this problem, we have no reason to move into space in
seach of new territories.

Actually, I have an idea for this.

Rather than confining ourselves to the surface of the Earth,
we could build what I like to call Habitation Or Utility Storage
Environments, Stacked or HOUSES. By piling one level on another
we could effectively multipy the surface of the Earth many times
over. If a given region is crowded now, we could build many very
tall HOUSESes, so tall as to apparently 'scrape the sky' to create
a local expansion of available surface area. I imagine dozens of
people could live in these scrapesky buildings.

Energy: If we solve this problem there is no reason to build SPSs or the space
colonies to support them, because we will have already solved this problem.
(The assumption being that we have waited for all the world's problems to be
solved, energy is one of them.)

Actually, this could drive space exploitation. Cheap sources of
energy on Earth means more heat and at some point more heat will become
inconvenient.

War: The is no motivation to migrate into space to escape war if this problem
has been solved.

Judging by what happened in the great wars of the past (WWII,
WWI, Napoleonic and Seven Years) the colonies would still be entangled
in terrestrial conflicts. WWn might even be triggered out there.

Anyone remember the family who wanted to avoid WWIII, so they
moved to the safest place on Earth, the Falklands?

--
It's amazing how the waterdrops form: a ball of water with an air bubble
inside it and inside of that one more bubble of water. It looks so beautiful
[...]. I realized something: the world is interesting for the man who can
be surprised. -Valentin Lebedev-