Since 1970 or thereabouts going to space has not been part of our national agenda. NASA has kept complete control over space. But since 1970 NASA has… - Stephen Baxter

But even the steady state, our best-hope future, may not be achievable without space.
Without power and materials from space we are doomed to shuffle a known—in fact diminishing—stockpile of resources around the planet. Some players get rich; others get poor. But it’s not even a zero-sum game; in the long term we are all losers.

There were no cop cars cruising through that darkness, no watching choppers or surveillance satellites, nobody out there to help him—no law operating save the savagely impartial rule of nature.
And yet every day he was struck by the strange orderliness of the place. Decaying animal corpses did not litter the ground, save for a handful of bleached bones here and there; it was rare to walk into so much as a heap of dung. There was death here, yes, there was blood and pain—but it was as if every creature, including the hominids, were a cog in some vaster machine, that served to sustain all their lives.
And every creature, presumably unconsciously, accepted its place and the sacrifices that came with it. All say one species of hominid, it seemed: Homo sap himself, who was forever seeking to tear up the world around him.

Almost all of history was a carefully constructed mythology for use as propaganda or nation building.