EPTHuman societies are fast approaching the stage where further developments in complexity and specialization are more costly than beneficial. In "advanced" societies, we see that most innovation is directed toward rent-seeking (like financial engineering) rather than developing new ways to live or to thrive. In less-developed societies, we see cargo cult-ish imitation attempts that lead to disastrous market bubbles and retarded economic choices.
The reason for this is the closing of the physical unknown to the human mind. The geographic unknown, the great wilderness, the open frontier--it has always served as a productive stimulus to human ingenuity and a productive vent and channel for excess capital from developed societies. However, once the frontier is gone, the excess productivity of a complex society becomes inevitably directed toward rent-seeking behavior both internally and externally (war).
Today, the unknown has become mostly technological. Why, you might ask, can the benefits of a physical frontier not be replicated here? It is because the current way of distributing the benefits of new technology is fraught with rent-seeking; a mind or organization which is engrossed in envisioning new technologies is often poorly equipped to think about how to correctly derive benefit from them. Moreso, much technological development seems to be focused on either something altruisitic (green energy) or something which offers no utilitarian benefit to society (increasing healthcare for the elderly--there is no benefit to keeping someone alive past year 80).
In order to resume human progress, we as a species need to open up the stars to human exploration--for profit.
One of the greatest crimes of the 1960s was the American effort to put a man on the moon. Kennedy and later administrations justified the cost as a way of acquiring prestige, and as a way of going in the name of "all mankind". The result of such a motive is obvious in hindsight. Seen as a purely cost item without any intended economic benefit, the Apollo program was killed in the 1970s.
The crime was that all later space exploration efforts became tainted with this air of exploring for exploring's sake. This culminated in a legal statement that space belonged to all humanity (see the 1967 Outer Space Treaty). This is a stupid notion as it made all of space effectively a cost item to any organization or nation, as any economic benefits would be nearly impossible to claim.
Space should belong to those that claim it.
In order to reverse this travesty and give humanity a new frontier to explore, it is necessary to revise this law. We should start with the moon, as it is a natural stepping stone to further space development.
The treaty should be revised to state: any organization which maintains continuous human habitation of a period not under one year on a particular point on the lunar surface will be granted one hundred years of subsurface and surface development rights within a three-hundred kilometer radius of that point of habitation.
In essence, if you live on the moon for a year, you'll own everything around you for a century. Good deal, and should stimulate space development without costing any governments tax breaks or any of that meaningless jazz.
Most importantly, it will push exploration in an economically sustainable direction--because the profit motive will probably be the only feasible long-term driver for this goal. And at a time when we as a species face an inflection point of resource overcrowding and rent-seeking behavior, such an outlet--a frontier--would not come a moment too soon.
TL:DR
We need to open up space to private claiming otherwise we're all going to end up overcrowding this planet and killing each other because public space exploration will never include the profit motive.
It's time for some real life TvT. I want to see me some goliaths.
