Quote Originally Posted by Ramil View Post
More goods and services is cr@p. They only enslave people. They work producing cr@p so that their customers consumed that cr@p and paid them so that they could consume some other cr@p (probably produced by their customers). Only 5-10% of population (or even less) are doing something useful. We could probably have been exploring the stars by now if people had just stopped consuming and producing cr@p and started doing something useful. This? More productive?
I think the society is not mentally ready for that kind of perception yet. If you want to get to the stars you have to have a reliable drive. "It's interesting" / "It's honourable" - are not reliable drives yet. "Let's have more comfort" - is much more reliable en mass. So, realistically speaking, we would only get to the stars if someone would be ambitious enough to open star solariums which make a very unique kind of tan.

Seriously, there is a lot of debates around why do we need a space program if we still have hungry people on our own planet. So, yes, we're far far away from not needing the cr@p yet.