I have a pet theory too - that the suckiness and stuckness of modernity comes not from a lack of frontiers but from a mindset that does not know what is "enough" and cannot accept limits.
A debt-based monetary system which requires growth has led us to colonize the world's territories, extract the world's resources, engineer demand for unnecessary things, expand to monetize all human attention to grow the economy via social media, and financialize to the point of absurdity.
Now with few frontiers to grow to, we are stuck unimaginatively optimizing rent seeking positions by off-shoring knowledge work, implementing AI, importing h1bs and now moving to a near full simulated economy with agentic workflows and commerce.
Instead of examining the purpose of technology and guiding it towards human ends, we have become pawns in a autonomous arc of progress in which humans have been been demoted to means serving the ends of capital and technology.
The dominance of a particular strain of technological rationality has led us to many believing that we would be better off repeating the process on new planets than restructuring and preserving what we have here.
Having tapped out new growth areas abroad, the machine has returned home to knaw on its own leg and consume what is left to sacrifice to moloch.
If "want" is the disease, "enough" is the antidote.
I have a pet theory that the suckiness and stuckness of modernity is largely due to lack of a frontier. There must be new territory to expand into, places no one yet owns that aren’t choked with rent-seeking parasites.
There was a gap in time between settling the whole Earth and space being economically settleable. If we can build financially viable moon bases now, then thankfully the suck period has ended and a new age of exploration has begun. Expect everything to get better in a million ways small and big.