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Rocket launches may dominate headlines, but the true bottleneck in space exploration lies not in reaching low Earth orbit (LEO), but in venturing beyond it. From LEO to the Moon or Mars, spacecraft still require costly kick stages or oversized boosters. A decades-old idea known as the skyhook could change that equation.

A skyhook is a rotating orbital tether: essentially, a long, strong cable that swings a spacecraft from one orbit to another, much like a sling. Unlike the space elevator concept, a skyhook looks much more buildable with current technology. By lowering the cost of Earth/Moon & interplanetary transport, skyhooks and related tether technologies could help make space travel beyond LEO economically feasible. The linked interview with Marcus Landgraf, from ESA, connects this to breaking resource limitations and enabling prosperity through space expansion.

How Close Are We To Building A Practical Skyhook? Youtube Interview with Dr. Marcus Landgraf, ESA Human and Robotic Exploration Programme)

"Between 2015 and 2024, humanity recorded one of the fastest expansions of basic welfare of all time: 961 million people gained safe drinking water, 1.2 billion gained safe sanitation, and 1.5 billion gained access to basic hygiene services, while the number of unserved fell by nearly 900 million. Coverage has risen to 74%, 58% and 80% respectively, while open defecation has dropped by 429 million people."

One of the most depressing of human biases is to hyperfocus on bad news, to the exclusion of positive things. 'If it bleeds, it leads, ' as the TV news shows say. Even in the social media age, where TV news is fading in importance, the same instincts predominate.

The results? People think the state of the world is much worse than it is. Not just that, they think they are powerless to change things for the better.

Meanwhile, groups of people like UNICEF and WHO, often dismissed as irrelevant do-gooders, go about making the world a better place. If the numbers given access to basic water and sanitation can jump this much in 9 years, then giving it to nearly 100% of people is in our future, and maybe sooner than we think.

1 in 4 people globally still lack access to safe drinking water – WHO, UNICEF

Luke Kemp, a research associate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge, has written a book about his research called 'Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse'.

He makes the case that, from looking at the archaeological record, when many societies collapse, most people end up better off afterward. For example, people in the post-Roman world were taller and healthier. Collapse can be a redistribution of resources and power, not just chaos.

For most of human history, humans lived as nomadic egalitarian bands, with low violence and high mobility. Threats (disease, war, economic precarity) push populations toward authoritarian leaders. The resulting rise in inequality from that sets off a cycle that will end in collapse. Furthermore, he argues we are living in the late stages of such a cycle now. He says "the threat is from leaders who are 'walking versions of the dark triad' – narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism – in a world menaced by the climate crisis, nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence and killer robots."

Some people hope/think we are destined for a future of Universal Basic Income and fully automated luxury communism. Perhaps that's the egalitarianism that emerges after our own collapse? If so, I hope the collapse bit is short and we get to the egalitarian bit ASAP.

Collapse for the 99% | Luke Kemp; What really happens when Goliaths fall

In the 12 months to April 2025, 6,100 Irish people emigrated to America. But the figure for Americans emigrating to Ireland was a third higher, at 9,600. The fact that this number has suddenly jumped by 96% suggests it might not be a permanent trend, but while it lasts, it might be a significant one, especially for Ireland.

3 million Americans hold an Irish passport, and 10s of millions more are eligible for one. Add to that, Italian passports are easy to obtain for Americans with Italian ancestry. An Irish or Italian passport is an EU passport, meaning you can work, start a business, and reside freely anywhere in the EU as an EU citizen. Even after Brexit, Ireland and the UK allow each other's citizens to work and reside freely in each other's countries, too.

Might the centuries-long trend of European-American emigrant traffic be about to reverse, too?

96% jump in number of people coming from the US to live in Ireland