Sure. The basic idea is that there are always people who just "don't fit in" to society at large. Those people can stay and cause trouble, can be imprisoned,

Sure. The basic idea is that there are always people who just "don't fit in" to society at large. Those people can stay and cause trouble, can be imprisoned, or can go through the safety valve to go live where they won't harm others. It also gives people opportunity for advancement; think of the many stories of families going west to find a better life. It allows societies to preserve a degree of individualism and a shared goal of expanding into the great un-known. I'm dipping my toes into deeper sociological waters here than I'm entirely comfortable with, but there's a broader concept of a "safety-valve institution" that can be viewed as positively helping maintain order or negatively keeping oppressed masses from rising up (the class warfare folks start beating there drums around here). Some more interesting reading: * http://www.ditext.com/shannon/shannon.html http://www.ditext.com/shannon/shannon.html * http://www.ditext.com/robbins/robbins.html http://www.ditext.com/robbins/robbins.html * https://sci-hub.tw/10.2307/2716011 https://sci-hub.tw/10.2307/2716011 The obvious issue is that the treatment of Indians was unethical in the case of America, but space exploration might allow us to get many of these benefits of historical colonialism without genocide. I'll admit that I'm biased favorably towards this idea, as the frontier could, in some cases, be much closer to a libertarian utopia than a more heavily-organized society, but the up-side is that it provides options for those who want more and less state control.