Elon Musk and the third alternative

Humans have a fundamental nature caused by their ancestral environment. Absent genetic intervention, that nature evolves slowly. It is tribal, communist xenophobic, religious, and limited in trade activities. It integrates equality and racism not as opposites but as two sides of the same coin since equality is shown towards members of the tribe while racism is shown towards outsiders.

Since the industrial revolution, capitalism, has evolved at a far more rapid pace than human nature. It is mechanistic, polluting, greedy, winner-take-all, fast-evolving, rerouting, exiting, and so far emergent AI.

The gap between this slowly evolving condition, and the fast evolving mechanism of high capitalism, I am going to call "rift" because it is a widening gap between us and the machine.

Near as I can tell humans have only four major approaches to the problem. 

They are;

1. Abolish capitalism to accommodate human nature (the Marxist-communist plan)
2. Abolish human nature to accommodate capitalism (manifests as either fascism or transhumanism)
3. What capitalism run amok (destroying biological life to replace it)
4. Go into space (the method championed by Elon Musk)

Space is a weirdly communist environment. A starship is basically a tribe on a ship. A space station is basically a city state. A settlement on Mars is little more than a small band of humans living in tribal configuration.

Space is brutal, violent, and deadly, just like the ancestral environment. Cohesiveness is forced on people by circumstances, but the threats come mainly from the natural world rather than other groups. Thus, evolutionary pressure is very high, but works to make people practical rather than religious. Religion is a tribal adaption that allows you to form armies to defeat genocidal threats to your tribe, but on Mars the threat is running out of air, food, or water. Space breeds hyper-pragmatic communists, while Earth has already bred religiously hysterical communists.

By "pragmatic communist" I mean someone who will kill you if you don't get off your ass and fix the air processor.

"Fix the air machine."

"No, because rights and shit."

"Throw him out an airlock."

But hyper-capitalism reemerges in space too. Once the population of Mars achieves a critical threshold hyper-capitalism comes back, and on a rotating habitat of many millions of square miles it emerges again. At the level of a Bishop Ring it emerges again. (A bishop ring is one of the largest possible megastructures that can be built with carbon nanotubes).

No doubt, a Dyson swarm composed of millions of rotating space habitats would be governed by hyper-capitalism; one might envision a form of insurance that guarantees the swarm will collectively point its mirrors at any aggressor if one of them is attacked, turning the swarm into a mega-laser, aka., a "Nicoll Dyson Beam," that destroys any space station that invades any other.

It also makes for a useful way to defend a solar system, and such a system can be coordinated with a market instead of a centralized government.

Space recreates the stress of the ancestral environment. It cannot be overstated how important this is. In the absence of threats to survival humans become physically obese, and mentally deranged. Our bodies have been built by evolution to confront daily challenges and threats to survival, and a sports car is not meant to idle.

Space is deadly enough that it may solve the issue of mutational load. Yes, the radiation of space increases mutation, but one can have a genetic archive for that, and one is evolving everyday to be more pragmatic. Lastly, space is the last frontier. If humans can survive there then we have made it as a species.

Whether Musk knows it or not he is pursuing the third strategy, though it may overlap with capitalism and with eventual abolishment of the species in favor of AI and a mind uploading, also known as substrate independence.