www.gylanic.org.uk/tranquilitybase

a gateway project:

From next year, Virgin Galactic start their first commercial flights into near earth orbit. For $200,000 you can have your 15 minutes - in space, seeing our shining orb with your own eyes.

Apparently the experience is so mind-blowing that people come down really affected and wanting to change things in themselves and their associates - like the total perspective zone of the Hitchhiker's Guide, if you're familiar?

Anyway, Virgin give you preflight training for a month at their custom made space village, before the event and a month acclimatizing after.

So if this is what we need for 15 minutes in space, how will our grandchildren be ready to contemplate living in a space hotel, on the moon or mars, if we genuinely want to go there, as a species?

"Fine", you say, "the scientists will go there first, set up the first lunar and off-world domes and everything they need can be supplied."

but I suspect people, ordinary people, will have to figure into the equation - the evolutionary lure will be too great to keep us here, waiting.

certainly, Buzz Aldrin (2nd human to walk on the moon) agrees.

So some of the first domes and off-world habitats will take a certain amount of adaptive thinking groups to take up the challenge and they'll have to be pretty self-reliant - no importing stuff, or using up the resources and moving elsewhere when we've exhausted them - stewardship would have to be central to the culture off-world.

and they'd have to get it right, right?
no place to go outside the dome - growth capped, cooperation a prerequisite, for as we all know:

It'll need some earth-based construct as a conduit, a transitional model of global proportions to get us to think about what will be needed from us and our environment - the whole sustainable ish...

Ironically, if such a model could be started, it would become a mirror - held up to us to allow us to see how we could change things down here, now.