Totally agree. I have a couple visions of attainable infrastructure evolutions, we should have every city and county helping sponsor X Prizes that would help us attain incredible improvements:
• elevate all city infrastructure up off the ground, 100 feet or more. If you figure that out you get arable, natural landscapes back and you keep your city too.
• How to bring light down to the ground underneath it all? I say we build transparent canals, use their shape to lense light through and around.
• these canals, there could be extra channels/tubes added to store and process dirty, utility and drinkable water
• create food programs that bring growing, harvesting, finishing and cooking down into the crowds of us who’d want to participate. Can we reduce the cost of food by orders of magnitude?
On the other hand, getting to 1st cosmic speed takes a lot of energy released in a relatively short burst or some kind of space elevator which we cannot build yet.
You cannot make this "gradual" really. You either get to orbit or don't. The "gradual" phase of getting into space is done. We got to orbit.
We need a major economy and scale breakthrough now or you cannot even try sending people off anywhere. So major that small improvements as done by SpaceX will not get there in centuries.