The New World was a bleak dystopia for a few hundred years. Preserving the Earth is a better option than colonising other planets, although less sexy.

> The New World was a bleak dystopia for a few hundred years

That's a bit of an overstatement. I expect if that were true, people wouldn't have kept on coming.

You're disregarding the extremely large number of people who were more or less forced to travel to the new world. Add up the slaves taken there, people sentenced to be sent there for crimes, people who had to leave their home country or starve and people who had to leave their home country or be murdered and you start to get a pretty large number.

Exactly. A large chunk of the population was forced to American against their will, and a large chunk of the people who chose to go to America only survived because of the labor of the people who were forced to be there. Claiming success on the back of slave labor isn’t something that’s super popular these days.

> That's a bit of an overstatement.

After reading few books from the period and later ones by Nathaniel Hawthorne, I don't think so.

> I expect if that were true, people wouldn't have kept on coming.

The people coming could have incomplete or incorrect information. Communication was slow back then. Separating fact from falsehoods about the New World would have been a crapshoot at best.

Even an entirely country got it wrong. Scotland bankrupted itself on the Darien scheme.

The bulk of immigration to the New World happened after the first 2-3 centuries, before that, the plurality were chattel slaves.

That’s of course ignoring the post apocalyptic lives of the natives that survived successive waves of disease and collapse radiating out from points of contact, but it’s habit at this point.

We can do both.

Colonising other planets is a lousy idea; at the very best you could at massive expense colonise Mars, but it would be (a) almost certainly worse than Earth and (b) only s doubling of our resources.

Orbital habitats, formed by disassembling the moon, on the other hand, can give us vastly more habitable area than available on Earth, and the environment can be engineered to be better than Earth ever was.

Recently I’ve become convo bed that other planets don’t have much of a role to play in our future except as a source of raw materials.

That exact argument could be made against disaster recovery data centers. Why bother building a new data center and buying two servers when you could just have one and save tons of money?

There's no place in the solar system that's remotely as habitable as Earth, even if the latter suffers a massive disaster.

Space exploration is more like Amazon spending $100B to build a hut with 10 Arduinos on the summit of Mt. Everest.

The argument isn't that we shouldn't colonize other planets because it's expensive, it's that we shouldn't colonize other planets because it's Pareto inferior to making orbital habitats.

> Moving to the New World is bleak, bleak stuff.

I mean... yeah? There was famine and then genocide, then slavery?

>>is bleak, bleak stuff

Is the movement so narcissistic that the very existence of the people already living there is not even noticed? Is this hypothetical country a place where you ruthlessly steal from the original people to make a state where private property is the only right? Because "bleak" is the exact word that describes the lives of the millions of people who don't even show up on libertarian radar.

And "hypothetical"is the right word because there were taxes and regulation form America's earliest beginnings. And, fortunately, it protected more rights than just property. Indeed, the founding fathers intentionally _removed_ the word "property" from the original phrase "life liberty and the pursuit of property"

If there are any analogies to North America, it would either be the Puritans who had shockingly strict ideological requirements on their members or plantation owners who lived by laws completely different than their slaves. Because we know these libertarian colonists are not going to be building their own log cabins or personally work "their" land. Startups are those bootstrapped farms and self built log cabins. Likewise space exploration. But colonialism, when it isn't simply theft, is rent seeking and always at best zero-sum-gain.

>not let the plot of a video game limit our social innovation

"Bioshock" is apparently a necessary comparison because its plot is clearly more accurately known North American history evidently.

Well let’s not forget “moving to the new world” also meant they process subjectifying the people whose land it was, in order to take it.

I don't see humanity doing anything but descending into self-destruction. I'm sure tax-haven offshore city states will prove once again that humans, taken as a whole, are craven ruthless creatures. It's the reason we are the dominate species on this planet.

Or maybe we are the dominant species because we cooperate so well. :)

Startups aren't remotely transgressive. They're heavily promoted, financed and supported by virtually every state government and have been for decades (centuries if you count the startups behind colonial enterprises).

Settling the solarsystem would be neat. It won't do anything to fix climate changes or overpopulation. It's not even possible in principle, let alone practice to remove significant quantities of people from the gravity well.

Creating lawless zones for the specific purpose of fiefdom isn't new, entrepreneurial or even particularly imaginative. Unless you count the villains of Connery era James Bond as novel entrepreneurs.

Just where do you think these marvelously useful, livable but mysteriously uninhabited "vacant tracts of land in developing countries" will come from.

Charter cities are, like startups, heavily supported by the partner nation. The models are Dubai & Shenzhen. Instead of being completely funded and operated by the state, the new generation of cities will be public-private partnerships between developers and nations.

A small, incremental degree of privatization. I have no idea where you get "lawless" or "fiefdom". These zones are requested, authorized, regulated, and monitored by a nation. Do you think the 3,000 SEZs in the world are lawless fiefdoms?

This is strangely hyperbolic language for what's basically a new kind of free trade zone. Would make a good movie plot, though, you've got a grand imagination!