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musk
wooden paddles and make off with a king's ransom in gold.158 But
Englishmen settled the North American continent, planted cotton in its
southern regions, and set up sugar plantations in the Caribbean Islands,
bringing back a bounty that boggled the mind.
The new economic horizons utterly transformed England. In the
1400's, the country had been a barbaric backwater, producing almost nothing
in the way of literature, art or science. But charged with the energy
unleashed by a whiff of fresh resources, Britain became a cultural dynamo.
The era in which she awoke was The Age of Elizabeth, and it gave us, among
many other things, the plays of Shakespeare.159
America has a host of new challenges available to it--biotechnology,
nanotechnology (the construction of microscopic machinery from units a few
hundred molecules in size), expansion of the cybersphere, and the
construction of intelligent self-replicating devices160 among them. But in the
long run, another more daunting frontier awaits us...one that looks as bleak
at first glance as our land once seemed to Columbus. Like Britain under
Henry VIII, the country which sucks its energy from that next frontier will
not necessarily be the one that manages to conquer some small swatch of the
world we know. Instead, it may be the one that first finds a way to mine
mineral-rich asteroids the size of Manhattan. It may be the country that first
"terraforms" another planet--turning its atmosphere into breathable gas and
its surface into a place where humans unencumbered by pressurized suits
could take a pleasant stroll. It may be the country that relinquishes dreams
of conquest in lands where the birds no longer sing...and turns its eyes
toward space.
Space could provide a new rain of resources...or it could bankrupt us.
But its habitation does offer two other advantages.
The first: international cooperation. No single nation can afford the
price tag for extraterrestrial development. To turn the wastelands of
asteroids and planets into lands of plenty would involve consortia involving
ets and cannon could overwhelm ten thousand Indians wielding
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