the rule of expansion

i'm going to drop some knowledge here that you can chalk up with Murphy's Law, Moore's Law, and the Competitive Principle.

Expanding human systems are much easier to maintain and therefore more reliable and durable than equilibrium systems--as long as they can continue to expand. This is because as long as the expansion, or surpluss that is the goal of the system (the surplus that the system is designed to achieve--expansion systems tend to be designed to achieve as much as possible, as opposed to equilibrium systems, which try to NOT achieve surplus in order to conserve resources and achieve stability)--as long as this surplus is large enough to cover the vagaries of variation within the system and support structure (and in a large enough system this is very possible) the continuation of the system (give continued expansion) is virutally assured.

The classic example of this is the military empire. say you have one empire that is aggressively expanding it's borders by conquering it's neighbors. the goal of the conquering is to send the pillage from conquered provinces back to the capital to train new armies. In a stable empire the goal is to not incur expenses greater than your income to ensure continuous smooth functioning. However, if you have a few bad years, if your stable empire has a famine or is attacked by a neighbor, it could be possible for your resources to be depleated suddenly and for your empire to collapse. The expanding empire, however, always has surpluss flowing in that it can divert from creating new armies (capital investment) to disaster management. Not to mention that all those armies would come in handy in fending off invaders. Also not to mention that your neighbors can't suddenly attack you when you are constantly fighting them anyway. The expansion empire is unstoppable and immune to disaster or bad luck as long as it can find profitable new provinces to conquer.

This is qhy markets must expand--if they have stability as their goal the minuite something goes wrong they could completely collapse. the point is that the capital generated by the expansion continually outstrips expenses because the of continued expansion.

this is also the beauty in the military industrial complex because the ammount of goods produced can be continuously increased leading to greater need for increase (arms race).

This is also why we need to build space colonies capable of self expansion.