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    musk

    wooden paddles and make off with a king's ransom in gold.158  But

    Englishmen settled the North American continent, planted cotton in its

    southern regions, and set up sugar plantations in the Caribbean Islands,

    bringing back a bounty that boggled the mind.

    The new economic horizons utterly transformed England.  In the

    1400's, the country had been a barbaric backwater, producing almost nothing

    in the way of literature, art or science.  But charged with the energy

    unleashed by a whiff of fresh resources, Britain became a cultural dynamo.

    The era in which she awoke was The Age of Elizabeth, and it gave us, among

    many other things, the plays of Shakespeare.159

    America has a host of new challenges available to it--biotechnology,

    nanotechnology (the construction of microscopic machinery from units a few

    hundred molecules in size), expansion of the cybersphere, and the

    construction of intelligent self-replicating devices160 among them.  But in the

    long run, another more daunting frontier awaits us...one that looks as bleak

    at first glance as our land once seemed to Columbus.  Like Britain under

    Henry VIII, the country which sucks its energy from that next frontier will

    not necessarily be the one that manages to conquer some small swatch of the

    world we know.  Instead, it may be the one that first finds a way to mine

    mineral-rich asteroids the size of Manhattan.  It may be the country that first

    "terraforms" another planet--turning its atmosphere into breathable gas and

    its surface into a place where humans unencumbered by pressurized suits

    could take a pleasant stroll.  It may be the country that relinquishes dreams

    of conquest in lands where the birds no longer sing...and turns its eyes

    toward space.

    Space could provide a new rain of resources...or it could bankrupt us.

    But its habitation does offer two other advantages.

    The first: international cooperation.  No single nation can afford the

    price tag for extraterrestrial development.  To turn the wastelands of

    asteroids and planets into lands of plenty would involve consortia involving

      ets and cannon could overwhelm ten thousand Indians wielding

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