But with geopolitics and global economics in various stages of disintegration, current needs and expectations reflect far too radical a posture to simply attempt reshaping NASA into a public, international or even global context and become responsible for running U.S. space activities as though it were a private sector corporation. Contracting out much of the research and development and operating aspects of the space shuttle program to the private sector is a good example, and reflects the support by NASA of several innovative private sector activities designed to make space access available to members of the general public.
An innovative and reasonably valid option might well be to formulate the management infrastructure and unique goal(s) of a private transglobal entity based on a new premise of Collective Intelligence, with quasi-sovereign authority and an investor citizenship option. Such an entity might connect and implement much of its management activities in cyberspace. This type of approach could free efforts at human species survival while allowing capitalistic private entrepreneurship to carry the objective through the next step. It could circumvent predictably serious time compromises caused by unrelated geopolitical pressures and constraints imposed by Earth-bound governments and populaces.
In any case, history suggests that unless the idea of Intelligence itself moves from individual to collective, all progress will be undermined by individuals and organizations paying too much attention to their own survival and ignoring the fact that the Titanic is sinking in favor of rearranging the deck chairs on one’s own part of the ship.
Without a new paradigm for the use of Collective Intelligence, NASA will die along with the entrepreneurial wherewithal to formulate a constructive, effective, politically and economically acceptable alternative designed to meet the changing environment.
