From Lileks:

I drove home listening to Bob Davis on KSTP; he was revisiting one of his favorite topics, one that mirrors exactly something I’ve felt for some time: the lack of any prominent cultural direction, and the strange incoherent sense of anticipation that lack produces. It’s as if the culture is treading water, with nothing truly new to give it focus and purpose. That’s not exactly a good thing when you’re competing with cultures that have both, in large quantities, and a sense of historical momentum the West has lost. I grapple with this from time to time, usually in the morning; it’s the odd suspicion that the West is exhausted. Not done or over or dead or resigned, but simply exhausted. We live in the end stages of the application of the Enlightenment, at least as applied to our own culture; what now? If you’ve ended debate on the great issues, you’re left with smaller ones, like 720 vs. 1080i; you concern yourself with indistinct dreads and assign to them a moral component; you luxuriate in the hot springs of partisan politics and redefine the issues so the gap between left and right looks like Gog v. Magog territory.

Maybe what the west needs is a frontier....

Stan:

Dammit, you got there first! :)

But I'll amplify the thought. I've seen it suggested that one of the reasons for the current ills of society, at least all the problems with drugs and urban gangs, is the lack of anywhere for young men to go to risk getting themselves killed. In the USA, you had a frontier, for about 150 years, and in both the USA and Europe in the 20th century there have been two world wars (with large-scale callup).

Of course, we also need a source of the resources we are rapidly using up, and a place to go if we mess up Earth.

The future belongs to whichever part of humanity gets into space, in a meaningful way, first. With NASA in place, that part won't be America.