Yeah I think it’s always important to put quality of life in perspective when talking about wealth gaps. The wealth gap should not be anywhere close to what it is now, certainly, and it’s easy to fall into a nihilistic cynicism over the state of wealth distribution in the world.

But I would counter that cynicism with the fact that we are even able to have this discussion at all. I’m holding in my hand right now a device that has the full scope of all human knowledge ever conceived accessible too it at the press of a few buttons, discussing the merits of interplanetary colonization with people from all over the world on a platform that engenders open discourse of current events in real time, from the comfort of my carpeted, centrally heated apartment while a machine does my laundry and my speaker plays any song ever written when I tell it too.

The way that Kings used to live 300 years ago would be seen as relatively quaint at best, downright uncomfortable at worst by our standards; it’s not the size of the castle so much as the quality of your life that I think people tend to miss. That’s not to say that life still isn’t a struggle, I think it’s something like 40 % of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, and those are problems that need to be resolved. I just think it’s important to keep the development of human enterprise in perspective, the things that it’s allowed us to achieve on an individual level would be unbelievable to people 300 years ago. In that lens, the development of outer space can really only be to everyone’s benefit. Rich people don’t benefit from an infinite supply of resources if they aren’t selling it to a populace that can afford it; there is no doubt in my mind that we are on the cusp of a civilization of outer space trillionaire‘s, probably even quadrillionaires. Access to space would fundamentally change our concept of the economy, at least for thousands, or potentially even millions of years. Right now we face shortages of lithium, silicon, helium, and other raw materials that are vital to modern life. But those things exist in functionally infinite supplies in the solar system, and new technologies such as fusion reactors could lead to a true golden age. The people that crack these technologies or first stake claims to these resources will be the wealthiest people in human history. But they can enjoy their fancy space yachts if that means that free and/or cheap fusion energy, power satellites, and infinite abundant access to raw materials and access to space uplifts all mankind. Look at how far we’ve come on an individual level over the past 300 years, and imagine the kind of quality of life that we could expect in 300 years from now in a society that is materialistically post scarcity. There would not be a need to want for anything, and scarcity-based economies would have to rethink how they function from the ground up.

It’s definitely a scary time to be alive, with all of these potential new changes, but I prefer to see them as opportunities.