vastly underestimating the resources required to lift each kilogram into orbit, let alone the development cycle to get there. and shall we start all this now here on earth just adding to the plight I outlined just before?

again, no sense of proportion of the actual issue here. we are DESTROYING the earth, not mildly scratching it etc.

establishing a space society is a hugely intensive operation that dwarfs the hundreds of millions required to put a few folks and some trinkets into a space station etc.

"we are DESTROYING the earth, not mildly scratching it etc."

Only for very, very particular definitions of "Earth". There are numerous events in Earth's past that by any objective standard are more destructive than even the worst possible interpretations of man's efforts to date and worst plausible projections of man's efforts in the future. To pick one that probably doesn't even come to your mind, nothing we've done is even within two factors of magnitude of the disaster of the Great Oxygenation Crisis. Probably three, maybe even four. That one was bad. Well, bad at the time, anyhow; certainly none of us would today prefer that it had never happened.

That we're doing various dangerous and bad things is undeniable. That we're "DESTROYING" the Earth is a memetic weapon that has been crafted and fired at you by people who want you to give them lots of power to fix the DESTRUCTION of Earth, and to ensure that you stay in their control by ensure that anyone who disagrees with that assessment has the human instinctual "religious heretic" template applied to them, so you don't apply rational thought. Things are bad, but not so bad that you need that much despair.

That said, I don't expect us to lift industry into space. I expect us to lift an industrial seed into space that grows there, and that ultimately not all that many people will necessarily leave Earth.

I also expect that the current situation will not persist indefinitely. If we have clean energy, and look at how that is developing lately, lifting things into space isn't necessarily that big a deal. A "environmentally neutral" launch platform isn't even remotely inconceivable; it's not terribly out of reach today. The question isn't about the technology of 2019; the question is about the technology of 2069.

What is astounding to me, both in O'Neills plan and Bezos offerings (and Silicon Valley Solutions in general, LOL) is the level of social and historical ignorance on display, as if we don't currently contend for control of resources, as if we are currently managing anything responsibly, and as if the political and social implications of such a project are occurring in the literal vacuum of space, rather than in the highly politically charged landscape of human endeavors.

These folks appear to avoid current events like the plague. Jeff Bezos is still highly involved in assisting the US government and it's various military and intelligence entities in seeking advantage versus other nations.

Taking nationalist ignorant policies and mentalities with us into space seems... retrograde, stupid, and doomed to failure. Inelegant.

There is a reason that all seriously futuristic sci-fi puts us WELL beyond this petty nationalist nonsense currently causing people to re-re-visit the 1980's yet again...

Even given lunar materials etc, if we are incapable of altering our current industrial trajectory from the top down (lack of political will), what on earth makes one think we could direct any space activities from the top down? It's currently sufficient for human leadership to favor selfish and group-harming goals, and there is no indication that this would change in orbit, lol

One currently sees the opposite of top-down coordination of space activities, after an initial cold-war-inspired display of bravado etc. (private ventures contracted to life public sector payloads into orbit) and you can be assured that plenty of both consumption of earths resources and pollution of earths atmosphere and water occur as byproducts. Private enterprise would seem to offer a "willy nilly" approach to anything, as such.

> Even given lunar materials etc, if we are incapable of altering our current industrial trajectory from the top down (lack of political will), what on earth makes one think we could direct any space activities from the top down?

I don't think the lack of a dictator--especially the sort of dictator you would support--is one of our problems!