[AnthonyMouse]

> Spanning the galaxy would take hundreds of thousands of years, if not longer. There'd be next to no contact between earth and settlements more than a few light years away.

Yeah, but they'd exist, which they don't right now.

> We currently have exponentially more wealth than anytime in history, yet most of it is being hoarded by a small percent of the population.

The "wealth" of today's billionaires exists almost entirely on paper. Even if Michael Dell has a huge house and a private jet and you don't, he doesn't spend most of his billions on himself. He uses it to own shares in his company. And the company uses it to make computers.

We have more wealth in the hands of corporations than at any time before in history, and there are some serious issues with that, but it isn't that they're somehow hoarding resources. Apple having a mountain of cash in an offshore subsidiary isn't why you can't afford housing -- that money is just somebody else's debt, not an actual consumption of resources.

And if you can make fusion work, it's the opposite. It doesn't matter if some people make a lot of money from it because the only way people will buy it is if it's better than the existing alternatives, which would imply that it's better than the existing alternatives. Which means you get cheaper electricity or less climate change or both. All they get is a pile of green paper they're probably never even going to spend all of.