But how do you bootstrap a complex, spaceborne, self-sustaining infrastructure for making those parts in the first place? There's this critical period of time before launching the first rocket of this project and the system becoming fully operational and capable of producing and assembling its own parts where if anything goes wrong, it won't be able to fix itself because it won't have reached that stage yet. That's simple logic. And look at how complex this whole thing is on Earth - material mining, ore smelting and refining, polymer manufacture, machining, semiconductor fabrication, assembly, testing, road transport and delivery, servicing and parts replacement on site etc. Now transfer all this to space, and fully automated...

I know what emergent behavior is, I was merely making the point that it has already been observed in software systems and that it (at least from my POV) satisfies these requirements. (And what exactly is poorly thought out about Thompson's research?)

Well...

If I'm not mistaken, this has already happened when evolutionary algorithms were applied to hardware design: some slides. The author of the program has no idea how the resulting circuit worked.

How does lunar recession affect things here? Tidal locking is one thing, but is the dampening effect that the tidal forces have on the Moon stronger than the increase in discrepancy between lunar rotation and lunar orbiting period introduced due to the lunar recession? The fact that the Moon's rotation is tidally locked right now indicates that this must have been balanced until now (otherwise "now" would have to be somehow special, which I view as unlikely), but what about a long time in the past, when the distance was much closer?

What? It can't even repair its own pierced wheel! How is it going to repair complex mining equipment?

And the space mining is going to be done completely by robots? We don't have that level of AI.

More in some places and less in others, though. And this seems like one of the extreme cases.

They have their very own property bubble, though. Although I'm not sure that is a good thing...

Oh, I think it's most certainly going to be profitable, but to whom are they going to sell it? North Africans, OTOH, have Europe right across the pond...

There may be such people, but given my general suspicion of ideologies, I don't even need to listen to them to be wary of anything that comes out of any religion, regardless of the pathway such damage to the society takes. But obviously, the fact that there might be yet another group with an agenda is independently worrisome.

This is all fine and dandy, but even if all that is true and correct, 1) doesn't that assume that all Muslims are theologians of your calibre to interpret things correctly (and I see them bickering how this and that should be interpreted with a frequency hardly lesser than that of Christians of various denominations arguing over parts of the Bible), and 2) given that it seems that virtually any provision in "holy books" has been misused at least once in history in the way described by the proverb "give the devil your finger, and he'll take the whole arm", often by a charismatic individual to sway weaker people, why should these provisions, of all things, be immune to that?

Because "fortune favors the bold" or "justice is blind" belong to the same category, and nobody objects against those? And I don't think the ancient peoples were dropping acid in college.

OR, it's a bunch of porn that you don't want anyone to see but still won't mind losing by accident.

Actually, given the fallibility of human memory, I don't see how you could convert imperfect memories into anything better than a "machine-forced testimony". You just can't beat entropy by using a magical machine.