I wish the future was closer...

I feel like a bit of a Pollyanna posting this, but...it's something I keep coming back to:


No president recently (Obama, Bush, Clinton) nor either party in Congress has really been willing to put their money where their mouths are as far as space exploration.

I'd contend that in terms of benefit to humanity in general, it's a far better use of resources than just about any other giant-government project, particularly wasting our time, money, and lives trying to drag some archaic tribes* into the 21st century, or saving people from medical consequences of their life choices.

* a goodly chunk of the south Asian subcontinent, as well as the bulk of Africa)

An intensive focus on materials-science IMO would get us over the hump in terms of the industrial-scale production of tensile-strength material suitable for a space elevator. We're GOOD at solving big engineering questions.

The construction of a station in high orbit (let the stupid, worthless ISS burn to cinders) would be a steppingstone to
a) orbital mining operations that could essentially end any need to lift resources into orbit, and even radically change the availability of raw materials on earth - I'd personally reject any plan to bring an asteroid anywhere toward earth...a one-in-a-billion chance of error would still be several orders of magnitude too risky.
b) nearly perfect security for tech-capable nationstates. The ability to quickly field "brilliant pebbles" that would be in practical terms immune to neutralization in a first strike would ensure that any state with the capability would effectively have a permanent second-strike ability to annihilate any opponent, regardless of what happens on earth. People may hate MAD as a policy, but the fact is, it worked as well as it needed to.
c) exploration and exploitation of the rest of the solar system becomes simple and cheap enough to become the province of business, not just government: nearly inexhaustible energy supplies around the Jovian planets, abundant hydrocarbons, the resources to sustain ourselves once we're out there, are out there.

Ultimately, the dispersal and distribution of humanity across the solar system would provide significant redundancy and survivability of the species in the case of catastrophe on earth. Pick your poison: economic catastrophe, political conflict, geological disaster, heck, a goof with the LHC or even extraterrestrials sick of our 'noise' in the neighborhood pitching a relativistic boulder at earth from light-years away - there's no end to the list of potential world-enders. And as we become more technologically capable, our ability to fsck up our entire planet is growing.

The first step is a BIG one, but once we get up there, I'm pretty sure humanity's natural urges would make the spread automatic.