Right, & what's powering these arcologies? When the CO2 is over 400ppm, what is living?Mainly because sending humans out of low earth orbit is... unnecessary at the time being. It's way too expensive for what it brings. If we want to do scientific exploration, remote probes are much more effective than human beings. And colonies are pretty much a colossal waste of resources given the environmental crisis we have now: it would be orders of magnitude more efficient to design and build arcologies on Earth to protect the populations against climate change issues.
Or is the population living on enormously lower standards of living? Yeah, the North is going to exterminate the South to keep its own high. Or enslave them. Or both.
Good idea, let's turn earth into a prison.
Yeah, let's keep the pollution & the excess CO2 in the biosphere. Let's keep despoiling the planet instead of turning it into a gigantic park.If you want some space industry, it'll most be for feeding Earth industries with raw materials and the handful of products that could only be built in zero-g environments.
We don't need to "send our overpopulation into space". The energy will raise the standards of living here, while we figure out how to take people off cheaply, & safely.I have never found any realistic argument explaining why we should do it, except maybe for:
1) the prestige of it;
2) protection against a colossal planet-killing catastrophe.
You won't send our overpopulation into space, it's not the 1600s anymore, and space isn't the Wild West.
No, wait, you want earth to be a prison of pollution & extinction--including Man, I presume, because if we don't do something like it pretty soon, that's all that's left.