A few years ago, an economist predicted that space development could improve the standard of living of everyone on Earth by a factor of 10. Without going into huge detail, this is a plausible scenario. Space has already radically improved life with anti-nuclear weapon spy satellites, weather monitoring, crop assessment, GPS, and materials science among other things.
UBI is essentially a primitive first step toward a post-scarcity economy, evolving from the present day ad hoc methods such as welfare, unemployment insurance, disability, and Social Security.
The biggest impediments to successful UBI are probably social/psychological but I will pass over that and discuss resources. If that economic improvement of space is true, and I think it is, then that is a classic "rising tide lifts all boats" scenario.
Imagine a 15% global tax on space resources brought back to Earth, to be used to fund UBI and other things. That by itself may be sufficient. But other benefits apply as well, such as vastly improved resources.
The platinum-gold group of metals are generally an example. These metals all have major applications in industry but are too expensive for most such applications. But imagine if we could afford to make high tension power lines out of silver, reducing power losses to resistance, and put catalytic converters on every fossil fuel plant and large ship - or replace them all with new reactor technologies or solver/gold based batteries and solar.
The range of ultra high tech products from electronics to biotech that will only be possible to make in the microgravity and vacuum of space is presently unknown, but promise to change life more than all human progress through history.
Without space, UBI inherently involves somewhat if a zero sum game, taking money / resources from some to give to others. But space development could change that equation so that everyone no matter how well off will be dramatically better off, and the so-called "socialism of the rich" will become the norm. (That term can be seen as "I don't mind if you take food from my refrigerator because there is so much I won't even notice.")
[edit] autocorrect (f-ing iPad!) and a couple of tweaks,
Submitted February 05, 2017 at 07:05AM by gar37bic http://ift.tt/2kAMfuc Futurology
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