While we remake the Earthly infrastructure and bring it up to 21 Century standards. We will also begin work to build the off-world infrastructure that will provide for a continuation of job growth and prosperity after the Earthly systems are caught up, and brought up to 21 Century standards.
The $16 trillion used in the 2008 financial crisis to give the banks too big to fail and Wall Street criminals another chance to gamble with your deposits is enough money to fund 91 Apollo programs from start to finish, and at the same time.
Human activity has had a serious negative impact on our environment. Overpopulation has stretched the capacity of the planet to maintain its numbers. Poverty and hunger have reached epic proportions. Greed and inequality have had a free hand with civilization and humanity.
We need to take all of our abandoned factories and repurpose them fast. Repurpose them and retrofit them to make and build the 21st Century off-world infrastructure. Take all the closed schools and open them back up again. Teach our people the skills they will need to make this conversion of our society a reality. A conversion that would cause Humans to become a multi-planet species.
If our nation can muster the will to give our $16 trillion to banks and Wall Street CEOs, and if those same banks and CEOs have the guts to gamble on a real big payday, we can do the things that will boost our civilization to the next level, and carry all of our people to prosperity beyond our wildest dreams. The things of which I speak are the colonization of Mars and the moon. The industrialization of space by the building of orbital solar arrays around the Earth, the moon, and Mars. The building of orbital industrial assets around Earth, Mars, and the moon to harvest and process asteroidal metals, water, and other materials into products used by the people on Earth and the new Mars and moon colonies. The construction of orbital human habitat suitable for apartments and recreation for the off-world workers, tourists, and even people who wanted to live there just because.
Our nation will have to institute a massive drive to get people educated to the level they would become proficient at these new tasks and objectives. All across the board, and in every profession, skills would have to be honed within our people to a razor edge. In science, math and engineering, and all other pertinent support fields, our people would have to excel. That means making the proper resources available for educating all of them.
We will have to use the unused factories and turn them over for the production of the equipment needed to get this new expansionist push going and to keep it going. Just like in WWII, when our people caused auto factories to start producing warplanes, now our abandoned factories would be turned over to producing spaceship parts, and the other things needed for an expanding civilization.
All the banks and CEOs who cooperated would be richly rewarded too. All the many millions of people newly educated, and employed by this new Off-World Expansion ( OWE ) will be needing checking and saving accounts. They will be buying electric cars, buying houses, and many other products their properly paid OWE jobs allow them to enjoy.
For the money, we spent on the Apollo program, and this excludes the equipment from the Mercury and Gemini program, we got all this.
15 Saturn V rockets,
16 Command/Service Modules,
12 Lunar Modules
Program Support Management Costs;
Construction Expenses for Facilities and their upgrading
Costs for Flight Operations.
If you take all that Apollo equipment and multiply it by 91 ($16 trillion worth of Apollos), what do you get? It seems to be a thing of reason to assume that for that kind of money, we could harvest trillion-dollar platinum asteroids. In fact, I would wager that is enough money to get the OWE really going full steam. So what's holding us back?
1365 Saturn V rockets = JOBS
1456 Command/Service Modules = JOBS
1092 Lunar Modules = JOBS
Program Support Management Costs X 91 = JOBS
Construction Expenses for Facilities and their upgrading X 91 = JOBS
Costs for Flight Operations X 91 = JOBS
We have the technology to start all the off-world expansion in a big way. It is as if our technology has reached a plateau that allows it. As we go, our technology will further increase because of the everyday experiences of many millions of people who will work in and migrate to our new off-world territories. Our economy would expand, and so would the equality that education, opportunity, hope, and the lessening of competition for scarce resources help to foster.
We must make a massive effort to expand Humanity's presence beyond Earth, or we may as well accept our doom confined to the cradle of a failed Civilization. One of the ones that didn't make it. We can remake our Earthly infrastructure, but unless we also make a push for the OWE, all of it will eventually be for not. We OWE it to ourselves.
Investing in infrastructure is not just about “bricks and mortar.” It is about solving the problems facing Humanity. At its core, it is about jobs and the economy, the environment, and the long-term survival of the human species.
While the economy has improved significantly since the worst days of the recession, our nation still faces a major jobs crisis. We need to create millions of decent-paying jobs, and we need to create them now. And the 21st Century infrastructure spending and the OWE are the best ways to do just that.
The OWE would add 34 million jobs to our world. Instead of losing badly needed jobs to Mexico and China because of greedy capitalists' schemes and connive, we will partner with them because of the many millions of excess jobs created by the OWE.
Each and every project will require equipment, supplies, and services – from architects, engineers, and building materials and supply companies. The millions of newly educated Americans will spend their hard-earned salaries in their communities, supporting restaurants and local stores.
Every family, every community, and every business relies on our nation’s physical infrastructure to survive and thrive. We expect that our roads, bridges, and trains will get us to our destination without injury and that our airports are modern and safe. We expect that our tap water is clean and that our dams and levees won’t burst when it rains. That the electricity we depend on is produced in a way that does not degrade our environment. That ours is a civilization not yet complete and never will be. Nation-building never ends.
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