Space will be the New Driver of Global Economic Growth

So Yellen and the Fed just wimped out of raising interest rates, yet again again. What does that tell us? The world is in an economic funk.

Nothing's working. China’s about to crash big-time so its role as a growth driver has definitely ended. The emerging markets are in an even worse pickle – Russia a total mess about to implode yet again, the Brazilians are busy self-destructing, Turkey could go the way of Syria the way things are going,. As I pointed out recently; global population growth is decelerating sharply “Could Genetically-Modified Humans Re-Ignite Global Growth?”).

The US was supposed to be the path to salvation but now all bets are off. The Europeans are facing the twin problems of centrifugalism and the Russians. Is global growth a fool’s dream?

Did you see the recent news about the company Moon Express? The one that’s preparing to explore the moon? We all know about SpaceX and its plans to go to Mars. Bezos’ Blue Origin has its own space plans. The Russian billionaire Yuri Milner is actually making plans for the first star shot. Is Russia going to beat us to the stars this time? What’s going on here anyway?

What this is all telling us is that the next emerging market is space. And it’s going to be a humdinger.

Terrestrial emerging markets are so yesterday.

There are 2 basic ways of getting growth. One is population increases. The other is exciting new products and services which lead to huge increases in demand and an explosion in capital creation and profits. Population increases are a relic of history now. So we’ve gotta go the other route, in this case space.

All of these doughty companies talk about exploration but really that’s just a fig leaf for their unprecedentedly expansionist plans for industrializing the planets. No-wants to be seen as a desecrator of the space environment and have the space regulators on their back.

All of these companies have massive plans they are keeping to themselves. How about the Hyperloop for Mars? Now that’s infrastructure!

Think about the huge investment in infrastructure that’s going to start occurring on Mars and the Moon, not to mention Titan, Europa and a few of these others in the not-too-distant future. That’s going to be like the development of the American Wild West, Africa in the mid-20^th century all rolled into one in the same 50 year timespan.

And folks, we’re not just talking about a vast explosion of new products and services and infrastructure for several (for now) planets. We’re also talking about terraforming them too, aka messing with the planets to try to make them more Earth-like.

Humans have never seen an opportunity like this! This will take engineering to a new level that has never been imagined. Instead of developing a continent we will be re-engineering the environments of several planets, all at the same time.

Think about how that will impact the business of suppliers – terraforming chemicals by the gigatonne, millions of 3D printers each the size of the Empire State building. Imagine a North Sea oil-drilling rig and then scale it up by a factor of 1000. Then cover Mars with same. That’s the sort of thing that’s going to be happening.

And it’s not even the colonization of several planets we’re talking about either. How about the open space between the planets? There’s a lot of that for sure. We’re going to be filling it up with staging colonies in space. Pretty soon the ISS is going to look like an ant colony as viewed by an elephant.

While we start preparing to descend into these hapless planets, were going to be developing massive habitats in space as jumping off points to get down to the surface of our planetary targets. That’s going to take some serious investment. It’s going to open up uncountable new business opportunities just like planetary development will.

There’s going to be people who will carp that it’s too dangerous out there and we don’t understand the health risks yet to humans. All true. But did that ever stop humans?

Did the fact that the sailors were all going to die of scurvy stop the Portuguese from going to claim new lands? Do you think Congress is going to halt space exploration and development if the Chinese have already started colonizing the Moon or, gulp, the North Koreans doing the same for an asteroid they happened to have lassoed for certain nefarious purposes, like directing it to wipe out an American staging point?

Of course we have huge swathes of the Earth that are total human and environmental disasters and will remain so for the foreseeable future, at least 50 years or more. What’s happening is that the Elon Musk’s and Jeff Bezoses have basically given up on them.

Who wants to mess with self-destructing peoples and religions when there are huge swathes of space out there all waiting to be developed and no alien there that we know of to offer any resistance? This is America without the Indians and Africa without the Bantu! A cornucopia of riches that we haven’t seen since the Crusades.

The fact is that the world is slowing down and to change that you need something unprecedented to change the equation. Space is it. It’s come along at exactly the right time. The technology is now just about finally together. The entrepreneurs and explorers have got the bit between their teeth. Politicians need a new source of growth and taxes to buy off their citizens so that they get to keep their own jobs.

Space is coming. We’re not just going to see boomtowns, we’re gonna see boom-planets. And guess what?  It’s already started.

The ground floor is no longer Earth. It’s all the space around it. Better hop on-board while the opportunity is still there.