To be fair, he did manage to mind read Sauron without revealing anything back, so Pippin does seem to have quite a lot of orb pondering talent.

You make very well expressed and thought provoking arguments!

And while I can recognise myself in a lot of what you’re saying, I think that us millennials are just now beginning to reach the age (28 to 42 this year, by the definition I follow) where we have some weight to affect that system from the position in it that we grew up in.

Any of us who wants to make our own space: work on a good website, start a coffee shop the way we want it, run a node in a federated social network… I feel it’s not until now that any of us have had the skillset, long-term motivation and economical position to be able to do any of those things seriously. Building a better internet is what we are doing right here and now :)

Be that as it may, my main point would be that basic orbital and interplanetary infrastructure is an incredibly worthwhile investment since it will allow us to start tapping into energy collection, as well as mining, of a different order of magnitude than we currently have access to on earth :)

It sounds like they should be more careful with how they store their methane.

I do want to stress though, that I think that space technology is the single most important subject we can focus on, except maybe medical. If extravagant trips for billionaire’s can fund a bunch of it for now, that’s fine by me. Only really means that governments should be doing more.

Every day, the sun emits roughly a billion times more energy than the earth uses. That is, all our technology, all our food, all animals, all plants and all the energy needed to create all weather combined consumes about one billionth of the sun’s output. The rest is sent into deep space.

This waste of the sun’s energy is so vast, that we as a species absolutely want to start capturing more of it as soon as possible, rather than squabbling in the mud for fractions of the 0.0000001% of the sun’s output the earth uses today. Obviously we need our planet to survive until then, but getting proper infrastructure in orbit and beyond is such a massive game changer.