[nntwozz]

This reminds me of Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot:

"We were hunters and foragers. The frontier was everywhere. We were bounded only by the earth, and the ocean, and the sky. The open road still softly calls. Our little terraqueous globe as the madhouse of those hundred thousand millions of worlds. We, who cannot even put our own planetary home in order, riven with rivalries and hatreds; are we to venture out into space?

By the time we are ready to settle even the nearest other planetary systems, we will have changed. The simple passage of so many generations will have changed us; necessity will have changed us. We are… an adaptable species. It will not be we who reach Alpha Centauri and the other nearby stars. It will be a species very like us, but with more of our strengths, and fewer of our weaknesses; more confident, farseeing, capable and prudent.

For all our failings, despite our limitations and fallibilities, we humans are capable of greatness. What new wonders undreamt of in our time, will we have wrought in another generation, and another? How far will our nomadic species have wandered, by the end of the next century, and the next millennium?

Our remote descendants, safely arrayed on many worlds through the solar system, and beyond, will be unified, by their common heritage, by their regard for their home planet, and by the knowledge that, whatever other life may be, the only humans in all the universe, come from Earth. They will gaze up and strain to find the blue dot in their skies. They will marvel at how vulnerable the repository of all our potential once was, how perilous our infancy, how humble our beginnings, how many rivers we had to cross, before we found our way."

[RcouF1uZ4gsC]

I think that sentiment is pretty naive.

Humans didn’t have such a perspective as they crossed oceans and continents, but these new spaces they explored became new spheres of competition and warfare.

My guess would be that space colonization if and when we reach that point will quickly turn into competition, rivalry, and warfare just like every other frontier in human history.

Even the first extra-terrestrial body humans set foot on was done in the context of the US-Soviet Space Race with the knowledge that the knowledge of rocketry gained in space exploration would also be useful for ICBMs.

[irrational]

Yes, I think the competition and combat of The Expanse is more likely than this utopian vision.

[h0l0cube]

Even in the Expanse it was more of a cold war between Earth and Mars, and a class war between the belters and the rest of the solar system. Globalization and the advent of planet-scale weapons have made relative peace and cooperation the more sensible option. The only wildcard is a sovereignty that has nothing to lose, a bitter history, and the power to exact real harm, and the closest we have to that in modern times is Russia. And the best way to avert this harm is to ensure no-one has nothing to lose.

But as I've said before on this forum, The Expanse isn't facts.

[irrational]

Of course it isn’t facts. But it more closely aligns with what we know of human history and nature than the belief that humans will ever be at peace with one another.

[h0l0cube]

Also a fact is that we haven’t seen a hot war directly between two major economic powers since WWII. Quality of life and the global commerce that drives it has been trending upward for some time. Cooperation has simply been recognised as the more fruitful path, but a global scarcity of vital resources could change that equation though.

https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace

https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace#the-past-was-not-pe...