So if we're mining on Lunar by the end of the 2020s, would that mean I'd see humanity spread throughout the inner solar system within my lifetime? If so, I'm truly privileged to be alive now.
I also wonder what a new space race would mean for Globalism. The scramble for resources and eventually colonies would surely cause friction.
If we get to the point of actual economical space mining within the next decade, unless we see either an internal US political collapse, or China throwing off the shackles of communism, we're looking at at
least another half-century of total US political and military domination.
There's no other modern nation with anything approaching a stable demography, and the US has a completely unparalleled ability to assimilate immigrants into
being American, even if that's been abused of late. Combine that with the economic power the US has, and you'll probably see
dozens of American space industry sites and colonies, compared to a bare handful from any other contender.
On top of that, the other nations doing the best, will be America's closest allies, who get to piggyback off of America's space industry to get some space infrastructure of their own setup, further reinforcing the pattern.
How this would affect globalism as a whole?
The totality is hard to predict, but I expect a
lot of declining US involvement in foreign nations for resource production purposes. Why risk unstable political climates, brushfire wars, and high crime rates, when you can instead simply invest in space, where
nobody can get up there to cause you trouble outside of US competitors? Physical security has a high monetary value.