Maybe I'm misreading, but I don't see anybody in this thread arguing that extraplanetary societies would be politically unstable.
It takes a lot of resources to keep one materially & demographically stable until it becomes self-sustaining: a tax on starting any.
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But we could all absolutely imagine Elon Musk cutting a deal with the california dept of corrections to send prisoners from "crowded" jails to do forced labor on Mars in order to pave way for future upper-crust colonists & some jobsworth falsifying consent signatures.
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I mean, PKD's psychological insight whenever he models extraplanetary colonies is "it'll be just like on earth, only with fewer resources and a greater distance from established states" so he models them on company towns, skid rows, and burnt-out suburbs.
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For PKD, outer space is california-but-more-so: you don't just have to pay through the nose and invoke massive government corruption for water, but also for air; you get massive influxes of population via scams like the gold rush and by indentured minority populations; etc.
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I liked Confessions of a Crap Artist. It was deeply uncomfortable in exactly the same way as his science fiction, but it hit harder because of the setting. I interpreted it as being about the way toxic masculinity can interact with economic precarity (much like his noir novels).
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Honestly, all of PKD's books are set in 1960s California, even the ones that are set in space in the far future.
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That’s a better way to think of PKD and most social science fiction. Space as a convenient allegory for talking about eart. Foundation saga was basically fall of Rome with 1950s Cold War bureaucracy thrown in. The robot stories were really about bureaucracies, not robots.
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So I guess my point is you can draw no useful conclusions about the future of space exploration from these kinds of works, since they really just use space lazily to talk about unrelated things.
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Unlike Nils, I do believe colony sized settlements might become viable. Despite what seem like prohibitive costs and hardships today. Stranger things have happened in human history.
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Even the Antarctica story is not over. It’s just too expensive to go live there *now* but costs can change. I’m she’s in 4000 BC the idea of cities far from major rivers seemed impossible the way Antarctic or undersea colonies seem impossible today.


