Sure Things II: Engines of Affluence
© Laurence B. Winn
High-speed communications will become an engine of affluence as business travel becomes too expensive, unpleasant and dangerous to support. Increasingly, businesses that can master the skills to exchange information electronically (or optically), with a global reach, will be able to take their current travel expenses to the bottom line. CEOs may still get around in private jets. Luxury air travel may continue, but business class, and with it all cheap air travel, will yield to telepresence, the illusion of being there.
Space tourism will become an engine of affluence. Its marketing will carry a subtle subtext for the rich, a way for the well-off to demonstrate their distinctiveness by doing something constructive, hazardous and admirable, a kind of noblesse oblige. And it will stand as a beacon of hope for those left behind, waiting for the gates of the high frontier to open wide.
Time frame? Less than twenty years.
These are not the only engines of affluence. Certainly they are not the final destination of those with superior ambition. Why? Because after money comes power.
