Sadly, and I say this with an equal measure of sadness and conviction, the bell has been rung on this (and industrial might in general )for 2+ decades. There

Sadly, and I say this with an equal measure of sadness and conviction, the bell has been rung on this (and industrial might in general )for 2+ decades. There was a chance to rebuild the us into a formidable industrial power, but it was lost in the early 2000s. We gifted all of our knowledge advantages to an industrial adversary with a 4:1 population and resource advantage. They have improved their primary education to be vastly superior to ours, and their secondary education is not far behind. Strategic goals were superseded by greed, and we will now have to settle for second fiddle or lower on the world stage with no hope of recovering a leadership role. Our military might will eventually be eclipsed by China as well, and in the interim will only serve to slightly slow our fading into irrelevance, while being an increasingly heavy yoke to bear as the expense of maintaining aging systems that we cannot replace continues to grow. Yet, There is one inflection point that we might possibly be able to change this at: an all out, no holds barred investment in space resource and energy harvesting: this expands our high technology edge, gives us a resource advantage, gives us new territory, incentivises rapid robotic expansion of our industrial capacity…. We could leverage dominance in the space frontier while we still possess the military advantage on-planet to defend our will to do so. But we will have to throw everything behind the effort, in basically a wartime footing, or we cannot hope to succeed. This is quite literally the last chance to avoid a CCP dominated world within 5 decades.