This looks a pretty crazy story to me for a number of reasons, but the interesting thing is the commendable optimism and hopefulness with which you wrote it, thanks for posting.
Hero worshiping Elon, or any other individual, isn’t very clever.
Starlink, makes no technical sense at all.
It was a near instant reaction to 5G technology 20 years in the making, which it can’t truly compete with, and which has to end badly, as it only takes a very small number of those many thousands of shrapnel satellites to go wrong, to write off the whole fleet, and the harm of what will remain will vastly outweigh any benefits it might have promised.
Traditional satellites were massively expensive to produce and launch for a reason, all had a very expensive systems Engineering lifecycle which included safe disposal, time consuming development of radiation hardened components, and enough fuel and ground system support for each to maintain safe orbits for twenty years or more.
Do you think any of that exists in the case of starlink?
Does it matter that when it fails, any part of it, it will become yet more hazard to humanity in the form of a large, completely uncontrollable amount of lethal whirling mass which will jeapordise all space flight, both manned and unmanned for the future?
But you did touch on something fundamental, at the start of your story. That was the notion that grabbing some capital from asteroids could fundamentally change the function of money.
Almost true, except, it would still just represent capital, no change at all there.
So instead of ceasing the grand energy Ponzi we are currently playing on Earth by our use of capital as money, we might dream of extending it a little with some extraterrestrial capital.
Isn’t it even a little laughable that we might try to fix the problems of colonialism by extending it even further, to other worlds?
The ultimate outcome of the practice of capital as money, is complete destruction of all of our environment, all of our society, and even all of our sensibilities and sanity, in fact, all of our humanity, and all life on Earth.
There is a really simple change that can be made to our use of money, that changes everything to the opposite.
The problem is we traditionally think of energy in terms of capital.
Why do we measure ongoing energy consumption in terms of KWh instead of Watts, for example?
Because every balance of it has to equate to a certain amount of capital, so many barrels of oil, so many litres of water shored up behind a hydroelectric dam, so many grams of plutonium, whatever.
That is the fundamental reason we are locked into an unsustainable grand energy Ponzi, we are commoditising and consuming the capital of Earth, which is finite.
The simple change is to move from capital as money, to energy as money.
So instead of so many dollars per ounce, per KWh, or per barrel, we need currency per Watt.
After that, solar energy becomes the most valuable commodity, as that comes cheapest, in fact for free.
That is the real innovation which is being realised by Bitcoin.
Each Bitcoin will be worth around 1MW of solar energy, no less, after all is said and done.
When that is fully realised and accepted, given of course we worship money, we move from worshiping that which is under our feet, to that which is above.
