Moving Civilization Into Space Is the Opposite of the Malthusian Struggle for Finite Resources

The dominant framework shaping global foreign policy is, in Randall Carlson's assessment, a Malthusian one - the assumption that resources are finite, that competition for them is zero sum, and that military superiority is the mechanism by which nations secure their share before the supply runs out. That is not a caricature of current geopolitics. It is a reasonably accurate description of the logic driving most major international decisions being made right now.

The problem with that framework is not just moral. It is practical. A civilization organised around competing for an ever-diminishing pool of planetary resources has a ceiling built into it - and the ceiling gets lower as populations grow and extraction intensifies. Space represents the exit from that logic. The resources available beyond Earth - in the asteroid belt, on the Moon, eventually elsewhere - are so vast that the zero sum game becomes incoherent as a framework for organising civilizational priorities.

What that transition requires, Randall argues, is international cooperation at a scale that current geopolitical thinking has not yet made room for. The undertaking of moving human civilization into space is too large, too expensive, and too consequential to be treated as a competition between nations. It is the kind of project that either gets done collectively or does not get done at all - and the choice between those two outcomes is, in his view, one of the most important decisions this generation will make.