Beam Me Out of This Death Trap, Scotty (1980)

On the demand side:

There was no web in 1980 (that was 1989), the non-web internet was barely getting started and home use of it was science fiction (even home computers themselves were only few years old, 3 years if you take the 1977 release of the Apple 2 given the 1 didn't have a case). Mobile phones had been car phones and experimental devices until just the previous year, they wouldn't become commonplace for about two more decades, and even then wouldn't be significantly bandwidth hogs with video calls and streaming until smartphones three decades after the article.

On the satellite side:

Satellites are mostly powered by PV, which itself was expensive in 1980 (I'm not certain, but guessing from the size of the Starlink satellites and the exponential growth curve for PV production and total installation having been only 105 MW globally in 1992, Starlink might have exceeded worldwide 1980 PV production all by itself). Packet switching comes with computational costs, and the computers in the satellites themselves were expensive (both in dollars and watts) and low performance. Phased array antennas were really hard, computational beam forming moreso. Ion drives existed in various forms, but Hall effect thrusters wouldn't be introduced to the west for another 12 years (1992, after the fall of the Soviet Union). Laser communication was being researched, but the first successful laser intersatellite link was 2001.

This seems to be a popularly held view. But I wonder what you think the last ~40 years of crewed spaceflight would have looked like if the shuttle had never been built?

Would the US still be using single-shot vehicles that are little more than incremental upgrades of 70s Apollo technology, as Soyuz basically is?

Or would some other reusable spacecraft have been built? If so, and given that the STS design was very much a product of the cold war era's military influence, would it have been much different? I dont think it would.

Among many things, the shuttle development produced the RS-25, which is the basis for the engines used on the SLS. So I'd argue that, from that alone, it wasn't a dead end.

Food is an interesting challenge, since we haven't done food production at scale beyond earth yet. Small scale experiments and applications seem promising though.

Full self-sustaining is not a requirement provided there is a supply chain. (And vice versa) . Of course: As self-self sustaining as possible as soon as possible would definitely be something to aim for.

The one company proposing to colonize mars in the near future would do so with a fleet of reusable spacecraft capable of 100-metric-tons to mars surface.

"Take three of everything" becomes a bit less of a problem in that kind of situation.

Within those constraints, the challenges are certainly still significant, but need not be insurmountable. Also said ship is -itself- not yet proven, so we'll have to wait and see.

Just because certain groups of people have beliefs about the "wrongness" of something, doesn't mean that they're in the least bit rational or need to be given weight. The uh space, beyond the Earth is literally a blasted wasteland created from ancient formation violence. Nothing we do in that sterile, radioactive, chemically toxic vastness of planets, rocks, ice and open void would by any sane definition be comparable to some sort of ecocide on earth, where extremely precious flora and fauna are destroyed.

The philosophy of degrowth is entirely a subjective moral view, no more morally valid than a philosophy of more growth, and humanity is emphatically not a virus, it just is, like any other complex species on Earth.

Very much untrue, at least in part. The solar system, including the asteroids, moon and other bodies, is absolutely, insanely loaded with valuable minerals and materials to a degree that makes what the old colonial powers sought in the New World and Africa pale in comparison, it's just extremely difficult and expensive to reach, for now, so on the second part of your comment, you're correct.

However, it's worth noting that the technology for extraction absolutely would scale down in cost over time to the point of space mining being as routinely profitable and practical as mining on earth.

I don't like comparing space exploration to the fundamentally cruel and exploitative schemes of Earth's governments during the colonial periods but even they at first had to deal with high costs and little benefit, until they developed scale. Humanity could do the same thing beyond the earth, and without all the grotesque moral failures of destroying whole human cultures in the process.

A hard reset on surveillance is required. We have to build housing that cannot be surveilled, blacklist by default. Only whitelist approved sensors.