Don't regard yourself as a guardian of freedom unless you respect and preserve the rights of people you disagree with.

Is a planetary surface the right place for an expanding technological civilization?

Don't regard yourself as a guardian of freedom unless you respect and preserve the rights of people you disagree with.

Dictators have always played on the natural human tendency to blame others and to oversimplify.

It is the hope of those who work toward the breakout from planet Earth that the establishment of permanent, self-sustaining colonies of humans off-Earth will ... make human life forever unkillable, removing it from the endangered species list, where it now stands on a fragile Earth overarmed with nuclear weapons. Second, the opening of virtually unlimited new land areas in space will reduce territorial pressures and therefore diminish warfare on Earth itself.

The fatalism of the limits-to-growth alternative is reasonable only if one ignores all the resources beyond our atmosphere, resources thousands of times greater than we could ever obtain from our beleaguered Earth. As expressed very beautifully in the language of House Concurrent Resolution 451, 'This tiny Earth is not humanity's prison, is not a closed and dwindling resource, but is in fact only part of a vast system rich in opportunities...'

More important than the material issue . . . the opening of a new, high frontier will challenge the best that is in us . . . the new lands waiting to be built in space will give us new freedom to search for better governments, social systems, and ways of life.