The sad thing is how close we are to getting into a space civilization and so much more but how we can't get our shit together long enough or priorities straight. One m-type astroid accessed in low Earth orbit – there are several already there – has more mineral wealth than all that humans have ever accessed in the Holocene on the surface of this gravity prison with its differentiated gravitationally sequestered artificial resource scarcity that hoards all the good stuff in the core. All we have are the scraps that have landed on the surface after it solidified and got mixed around. The m is for metal. Those are remnants of differentiated, read - concentrated, cores of planetesimals. That kind of wealth makes resource scarcity obsolete and creates both wealth and infrastructure resources to get into space colonies. Space colonies cannot have waste systems. Their primary constraint is heat radiated into space. The wealth to fund and create such a sustainable environment fixes much of what we fail at now. It moves populations into space too. We've known about how to build the stations since Dr. O'Neill did the studies in the 1970s about only using established materials science and engineering to create the O'Neill cylinders at up to 9 kilometers in diameter and 30 kilometers long with just steel and concrete. The wonder of such innovation would accelerate our passage into the next age of technology – biology. One day the masters of biology will look back and pity us in our primitive stone age of silicon. The foundations of that world are stones of the future orbiting around us now.

That is what I see when I look up. I see the twinkling reflections of cislunar stations much brighter than the background stars, a place where most humans live a few centuries from now. It is a remarkable place after the end of the age of scientific discovery at the beginning of the engineered expansion, but still centuries from my Parsec 7 that I call home.