Absolutely. The Internet was for a short while a proxy frontier, but now it's largely "settled" at least as far as the average person is concerned. The endless

Absolutely. The Internet was for a short while a proxy frontier, but now it's largely "settled" at least as far as the average person is concerned. The endless culture war shitshow is a preview of what happens when there is nothing to do and nowhere to go. Anyone with children knows what bored isolated kids are like. Adults are just grown up children; our psychology is not that different. We go fucking nuts. Our cultural and political insanity will only get worse from here on out unless there is some frontier, some unknown, some mystery somewhere. Again I feel like I should stress that this condition is unprecedented in human history. One has always been able to walk off in some random direction and go elsewhere, and contrary to what some people think there was quite a lot of travel in the ancient world. Ötzi the ice mummy was found carrying copper tools with copper that likely came from quite far away: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ötzi#Tools_and_equipment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ötzi#Tools_and_equipment Edit: total tangent but: I use the term settlement instead of colonization because I think the European colonial era is kind of a bad model of what this will be like. The best model I see in history for what space migration will be like is the Polynesian settlement period. https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1586/polynesian-navigation--settlement-of-the-pacific/ https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1586/polynesian-navigat... SpaceX is building our equivalent of the Polynesian multi-hulled canoe.