“… a world made up of finite space and resources” exists only in the virtual reality of the Malthusian ideologues, who serve the Empire by bullying the poorest nations into rejecting development. In the real world, “resources” are transitory; changes in technology make them obsolete, superseded by new “resources” which were previously thought to be useless. And the real estate of our planet, in isolation, may be “finite space”, but there is no reason why we ought to confine ourselves to it. Until the recent shift toward Dark Age culture, everyone took it for granted that we would continue to extend human civilization out into the stars.