More and more, I’m buying this idea but unfortunately I think we’ll have to wait a few centuries until serious space colonization becomes a viable thing in the way “escaping to the West” was a thing two hundred years ago.
At the heart of it is that people need to feel like they can accomplish something before they even try. There needs to be enough low-hanging fruit for people to grab onto to start the journey. This builds them up more and more. Eventually they do to things that, at first, seemed impossible.
There is such a bias for bad news to surface that people think society is consistently getting worse and it seems like there is this obsession with using law to “fix” every societal ill when most of these “fixes” just pushes the problem out of view.
We have a track record of taking (what we may perceive as) societal issues and turning them into a legal issue, the result of which has contributed to, for example, the United States being a nation with one of the highest (if not, the highest) percentage of its citizens currently incarcerated - a fact we should be absolutely ashamed of, not to mention the treatment of those reentering society.
We live in a pseudo police-state who’s laws are written by people who are affected the least by them or consider (or care) about externalities caused by a direct or indirect consequence of the law. We have turned drug use/addiction (by proxy with “possession”) from a medical problem to a legal problem. Some states have done the same with abortion. The content of libraries are being challenged because, “think of the children!” My county criminalizes working on your own vehicles on your own property, and California’s emissions requirements have created an undue burden on those with little means via a smog exemption date that is fixed and the requirement of specific emissions equipment that is frequently stolen, preventing vehicles from keeping registration current without a very costly, multi-thousand dollar repair. This leads to cars being prematurely scrapped because people just simply cannot afford it.