of capitalism, Herman Daly on his part poses the rhetorical question whether his concept of a steady-state economy is essentially capitalistic or socialistic. He provides the following answer (written in 1980): Daly concludes by inviting all (most) people — both liberal supporters of and radical critics of capitalism — to join him in his effort to develop a steady-state economy. Pushing some of the terrestrial limits into outer space Ever since the beginning of the modern Space Age in the 1950s, some space advocates have pushed for space habitation, frequently in the form of colonization, some arguing as a reason for alleviating human overpopulation, overconsumption and mitigate the human impact on the environment on Earth (if not for other reasons). In the 1970s, physicist and space activist Gerard K. O'Neill developed a large plan to build human settlements in outer space to solve the problems of overpopulation and limits to growth on earth without recourse to political repression. According to O'Neill's vision, mankind could — and indeed should — expand on this man-made frontier to many times the current world population and generate large amounts of new wealth in space. Herman Daly countered O'Neill's vision by arguing that a space colony would become subject to much harsher limits to growth — and hence, would have to be secured and managed with much more care and discipline — than a steady-state economy on large and resilient earth. Although the number of individual colonies supposedly could be increased without end, living conditions in any one particular colony would become very restricted nonetheless. Therefore, Daly concluded: "The alleged impossibility of a steady-state on earth provides a poor intellectual launching pad for space colonies." By the 2010s, O'Neill's old vision of space colonisation had long since been turned upside down in many places: Instead of dispatching colonists from earth to live in remote space settlements, some ecology-minded space advocates conjecture that resources could be mined from asteroids in space and transported back to earth for use here. This new vision has the same double advantage of (partly) mitigating ecological pressures on earth's limited mineral reserves while also boosting exploration and colonisation of space. The building up of industrial infrastructure in space would be required for the purpose, as well as the establishment of a complete supply chain up to the level of self-sufficiency and then beyond, eventually developing into a permanent extraterrestrial source of