Private ownership must be the critical part. Perhaps the entire capitalism can be derived from just private ownership. "Means of production" seems almost superficial.

The UN has been promoting internet censorship lately. No help to expect from them.

The purpose of tax is to provide "free" services?

Why do people become "leeches" for using this "free" service without paying anything back? Is the service not really "free"?

Or is the problem that someone else pays for this "free" service? Aren't the taxes supposed to work like that?

That is already too far.

7 GHz processor speed and it still takes 10 seconds to load Windows. . .

though why our goverment allow and support rendition, I cannot fathom

File-sharing for slaves, slave-sharing for politicians...

There are a lot of possibilities once LEO can be reached reliably. I think SpaceX has a good chance to do it.

Once LEO access is cheap enough, someone could build a nuclear powered space-only vehicle, that would never land on Earth and would stay in space all the time (to make the environmentalists happy).
At first it could be powered with RTG-s (the tech already exists today). Later it could be upgraded to use actual nuke reactors.
Something like that could escape the Earth's gravity very easily.

Politicians look at it and say ... "Those climate change kooks are trying to kill our economy!"

Politicians don't own the economy, it's not theirs.

Also technology tends to advance and prices tend to go down. What costs 50 trillion today may cost only 1 billion tomorrow. It's better to wait.

This may be the last chance to see it from Earth in the next 100 years, but Venus transits can be seen all the time from an orbit around the Sun. With the development of space travel in the near future, it is very likely that many people will get another chance to see a Venus transit from space, within their lifetime.

I can imagine space tourism companies offering "Venus Transit" tours in the not so distant future. (Maybe 10 - 15 years?)

Watermarks can be destroyed by averaging multiple watermarked copies into a single copy.

Incandescent bulbs give sharp shadows and they have a superior light spectrum.

They also cost 1% of the price of this new light bulb, and are not poisonous.

I don't care if 99% of the power they consume is turned into heat. I will pay happily for it.

Thanks for the diagram with the project completion estimates. It creates a nice context for the "20 years away" predictions. The level of detail in the answers is great too.

Digging underground, going into space, colonizing the oceans. There is plenty of room for expansion.