Druid Peter
Sep 6, 2018 · 1 min read

I appreciate the caution and the forethought, Ethan Siegel! But I do not believe that humanity has moved past the age of Columbus when it comes to exploration. The best and brightest of us like to think of ourselves as more enlightened, more cautious. Those who work at NASA and other agencies, I imagine are perhaps the least violent, most conscientious specimens that the human race has ever had the privilege to create.

But beneath them are the CEOs and the Power Players, the Captains of Industry that inevitably will follow on the heels of the great, enlightened caution of the early space agencies. Already, with the competition heating up between the private rocket corporations of the world, the culture is starting to change. In time, the centralized scientific unity of early space ventures will give way to the ambitions of a very different breed of men, and the early unity of humanity will give way, fracturing into the natural rivalries that are only all too endemic to the Human Race.

It is only when things are so incredibly, prohibitively expensive that entire civilizations may impose law and order onto the cosmos. But as tech gets cheaper, the prerogative in space will shift to corporations. And, well… we all know how that tends to work out, lol.