First, I want to say I really appreciate you making the effort to point out these objections or questions, because I really had no idea we had such divergent understandings. Some things seem to have been poorly expressed by me, and has prevented my meaning from being understood. I am really surprised by the divergence between our understanding of tech advance, and am encouraged by this, because I know we are both reasonable people that, were we to honestly make the (substantial) effort it would take to thoroughly discuss each of these areas of divergence we'd be able to agree on much.
But, I do understand these issues aren't within your range of interests, and this is revealed by that divergence in our understanding. I am not particularly interested in a variety of subjects, and while I can nod politely and make attentive sounds during a lengthy discussion of them, I do understand just how interminable such a discussion can feel like it is.
So I won't do that to you. None of this is anything you have to consider. You have a full and rewarding life and I don't need to disturb any of it to enjoy discussing things with you and learning from your perspective. But realize that Earth is a large aquaponics system in space. We live in space right now.
I'll just touch on a couple things so you won't have to keep considering me completely irrational on the subject. First, I don't mention a time frame, and there's a lot of different time frames, from decades to centuries. When Mercedes was constructing his horseless carriage in the late 19th Century, he may have waxed prosaic on a future in which such carriages were common - and even those familiar with the device he was constructing would have been extremely dubious such impractical devices, as his early experiments surely were, would ever be popular at all.
That's about where we're at with table top manufacturing, maybe a little bit further, since there are hobbyists and enthusiasts in the space, but not much further than that. The home manufacturing industry has certainly not approached the comparative point in it's development as automobiles reached when Henry Ford standardized precision parts and invented interchangable part manufacturing, assembly lines, and the like. For a non-hobbyist to have a vision of a Model T in every barn before then just from having seen some of the bespoke prototype automobiles that were available would be comparable to you grasping that everything that could be needed by a household could be manufactured by the household, and this would become the rule, rather than the exception.
It's not something you have a level of interest to gain an understanding of how useful it could be, just as people that rode horse drawn buggies before Ford produced any Model T's would have no idea they could ever be as useful as Ford (and paved roads) made them. Had someone before Ford described the Autobahn of the 1970s as the certain result of automobiles, it would have caused them to think, as you probably do of me, the dreamer was quite irrational. I will here note that as roads are to automobiles, automation is to home manufacturing. We eventually won't need to run this machinery because AI will. This is the only real utility I think AI actually has, because I don't think it will ever become capable of consciousness.
Also, I agree that not everyone will have that mentality, as you say, to become able to produce what they need, even after supply lines are cut and there aren't markets anymore. Many people can do many different things, and most can do many things they don't want to do, if they have to do them to live, but not everyone can do everything, and there are certainly many folks that just couldn't make the leap. I don't think everyone will. I do think enough will. You mention currency. There is a post-market economy coming. There will not be any way to buy and sell things, and no money. Eventually space habitats either make what they need, or die of unmet need.
Very few will pioneer in space, because at first it will be far more restrictive than prison. Just like pioneers in any major migration or diaspora, the initial conditions for the first are life threatening, and only some of these attempts are even survived. The first attempt to colonize N. America by England failed, and the fate of the Jamestown colonists is still at question, for example.
However, after a couple decades of effort some successful colonies did arise, and soon had quite livable quarters and towns. Space will be like that too, the early efforts incredibly difficult and survival challenging. There may not soon be hikes in mountains as is possible on Earth, but after some development environments will become quite comfortable and pleasant. While montane, riverine, and lacustrine expanses may be many centuries off, I am confident environments with forests, ponds, and shoals, flocks, and herds of animals, much like parks (although trees will be young, herds small, and ecosystems still being established) within a century of the first pioneers. I am sure that is not how you envision space environments, but I am quite confident that people need such environments, and that's what they will live in: large aquaponics systems.
I think at some point I referred to illimitable resources that are available everywhere else but Earth, and used the expression 'off Earth' that may have been understood as 'of Earth'. My meaning was that there is so much raw material to be developed that no one has claimed, no one owns, and nothing prevents the ambitious from developing but their effort, that there will be a lot of pioneers intent on getting some of them first. Asteroid Psyche is estimated to be worth from $1 - $10 quadrillion.
Someone ambitious wants to develop it and become the first $Quadrillionaire, and they'll be willing to suffer a lot to earn that distinction. Anyway, that's just one asteroid. There's millions of them pretty close to Earth, and billions of them a little further away. That's the magnitude of resources that are available just in the solar system, so much that the wealth that can come from such development isn't comparable to anything that has ever been possible on Earth. Inconceivable wealth.
But that's all I wanted to address. I don't need to convince you of anything - but very much don't want you to think I'm irrational, because I respect your opinion. It seemed to me you had to think me irrational from the gulf in our understanding. I hope I have at least suggested I am not bonkers, if I've not convinced you to go out and buy a laser engraver right away.
I want to pick out one of my sentences and elaborate on it.
I say it is a fact that people on our planet will always have a discrepancy that makes some people rush ahead and others resist. I am transferring today's efforts to equalise the human condition for all to a space age.
My most important argument is this: While on our Earth humans lagged far behind the technological deployment possibilities that others were already applying, the endeavour to make undeveloped societies equal to those already technologically advanced is always subject to a time lag. It becomes even more tricky when the once technologically more developed ones have spread their new way of life and the previously underdeveloped societies have caught up, it can happen that the former are left behind and suddenly find themselves in the same situation as the formerly Third World. And so on.
The great conflict can be observed today: While people from other parts of the world are immigrating to Europe en masse, who have previously lived a fundamentally different culture, and who also come from crisis areas where they have been reduced to survival (war, murder, manslaughter, shortages), they lack the mostly peaceful coexistence of people in the host countries.
They will or do see the locals as weak, as they do not appear to have preserved a genuine culture that is perceived as dominant. Since Europeans have given up on the concept of family and are under the illusion that all people are alike, and they believe that importing foreign cultures would be able to preserve their own, it may well be that these foreigners despise them. If only for the reason that they do not want to be abused as pawns, because it basically characterises the locals as naive racists.
It takes a small proportion of the newcomers to enforce their right to rule and to subjugate the original Europeans. Sooner or later, we will be outnumbered anyway and will die out due to our childlessness. Our geographical proximity to the African continent and the vibrant Islamic culture makes our homeland a new habitat for them. Nevertheless, they will be trapped as well and join us in our crisis. That contains some dangers, to say the least.
While Europe is in all probability heading for long-lasting crises, the East in Russia and Asia has developed out of its former backwardness and poverty. Not only that, they have overtaken the West. In my view, this has mainly happened because the Americans, but even more so the Western Europeans, have been unable to continue to innovate.
These cultures created people who prioritised the cultivation of decadence and promoted incompetence rather than competence. They are at a disadvantage compared to those who have only recently escaped difficult living conditions and have therefore not forgotten both the mentality and determination to make something out of their lives and defend themselves against enemies. Russians, just by the last three years, learned to fight a super modern war. The Russian identity will be positively pushed by that.
What is left of us Germans, for example, is hardly recruitable for both genuine science and a standing army, in my opinion.
I hope though that I am wrong and that crisis may be softened and our foreigners are going to appear more peaceful instead of hostile, and become our allies instead our enemies. But I am afraid that in order to gain respect, we have to change our policies.
A great many intricacies emerge from your considerations that are relevant to the matter. Sadly, I think in trying times subtleties are neglected as obdurate challenges resist clever solutions, and instead are solved with brute force or not at all. History is clear that from time to time trying times come, and they don't go away until the trials thereof are overcome. When facing trials it is easy to falter. Faint hearts full of fear fail, but feet carry us on even when our hearts cannot. The cataclysms of the day are never viewed from a perspective that encompasses the geological history of humanity. Geological catastrophes seem fictional. Pompeii's devastation after Vesuvius erupted is a museum exhibit. The supervolcano Toba, some 75k years ago, laying waste to S. Asia from Africa to Indonesia, burying India under ~6m of ash, is almost inconceivable. The Burkle crater in the Indian Ocean is ~5k years old, and left deposits from tsunamis >1 kilometer high in E. Africa and the Middle East, a doom hardly imaginable to see coming.
People survived these things. People will survive this century in Europe too. Besides geological history, people have geopolitical history. In truth geopolitical catastrophes can be even more devastating than natural disasters, because they can target people deliberately, while chance chooses the victims of volcanoes and meteorites. Samarkand and the Amu and Syr Darya basins have still not recovered their populations from prior to the Mongol invasion in the 13th Century (although this information is unvetted, perhaps hyperbolic or dated, as my research into irrigation on the Amu Darya claims irrigation utilization of over half the river flow presently). Because they resisted conquest, the Kwarezmians were genocided, their fertile soil salted, and centuries of development of irrigation works destroyed.
People came back, the salt washed away in scant rains, but the irrigation works were (claimed) never fully restored, and the productivity of the land never again supported as many people as it had when originally irrigated.
On Earth we are so common that human life is squandered. This will be completely turned on it's head in space, with the scarcity of good company the one thing AI cannot deliver, much less in such abundance any would squander it. Humanity adapts to it's conditions, and the close and unavoidable association we experience today devalues our good company, while such scarcity as interstellar distances between us will create will increase the value of good company incalculably. Appropriately valuing the scarcest thing in the universe, good company, will become an evolutionary hurdle that will eliminate them incapable of it rapidly because society is necessary to a social animal and the extremity of it's scarcity will increase the importance of being good company to survival beyond reckoning.
The abundance of resources and automating their development will create circumstances of inconceivable wealth of material goods to us that will be utterly unremarkable to them availed of it. The separation of people by relativistic distances will create practically absolute freedom and security. I fully concede these predictions are centuries in the future, but, in the event these technologies develop, will be the certain consequence. The technological advances necessary are all in process presently, and if we take the survival of the human species as a given, I do not see any reasonable basis for assuming they won't mature to the requisite state.
We are left to assess the several hurdles that must be surmounted to attain to fully automated production, and at will space travel (which I will argue is a product that will be one of those fully automated, in due time). AI obviously exists and the most advanced AI that has been produced to date, Deepseek, has just been released into the wild as open source code. Clearly that tech advance is underway. As to table top, or individually owned and operable means of production, in every field of industry, I also assert have advented, if yet in primitive prototypical form. Since these technological advances are, according to my research, ongoing and are incapable of being prevented from maturing because they are the mandate of the laws of physics, then the state of humanity I predict is only a matter of time and engineering - unless I have grossly misunderstood some factor that puts the kibosh on some critical advance.
I know this discussion is boring to you, so don't expect you to spend effort or time to develop such criticisms, but would not be disappointed if you did. I have written pages of text, and serially condensed to about 10% of it's original extent, so I have diligently done my best to be as brief as possible out of respect for your preferences.
Edit: bah! I neglected to address why humanity would be isolated by space travel and individual ownership of automated means of production, which I edited out some pages of explanation in a brutal quest for brevity. Your description of communal efforts isn't the result of decentralization, but of centralized production.
When humanity is availed automated means of production to individuals, crews will not work together, because that introduces that competition and confrontation wholly avoidable by individually laying claim and developing a resource. Because the means of production are owned by individuals and wholly automated, no laborers, no crew, no corporate structure is necessary, nor would the fractionalization of the wealth produced be very tolerable if accompanied by vicious competition, as we see close quarters produces. Vastly more sites to be developed exist than there ever will be individuals to develop them, so individual, or at most, familial colonies will be developed, rather than communities fraught with potential violence, betrayal, and brutal competition.