Space Stations

Our planet seems to be going in the wrong direction.  I think of Valerian's City of a Thousand Planets, where the ISS draws humanity together and then begins to attract all sorts of other species to a gret sharing in space.  Now we see not only that the ISS is about to be abandoned in  a few years instead of upgraded, but also that the three major space powers are planning on each building their own orbital facilities.  China was arbitrarily excluded from the ISS by the USA in the first place and has gone its own path.  This past week, it launched the first component of its own station.  Russia has announced that it, too, plans a similar commitment because the USA has violated its own treaty promises (again) and opted to switch from a quasi-civilian NASA to an overtly military Space Force.  The thrust of our government's interests seems to be permitting megacorporations to dominate space through extraterrestrial mining.  Meanwhile, secret military projects continue to proliferate outside our atmosphere at the expense of planetwide research to protect us from such potential disasters as meteor impacts and solar flares.  One wonders what will happen with such entities as the European Space Agency, which has so far avoided the militarization or commercialization of the solar system.  Instead of pulling together, our species is fracturing into a rabble of quarreling, grasping tribes that ignore the prospect of mutual protection and the greater good.  If there are alien intelligences out there, perhaps watching all this from a luxurious floating casino beyind Alpha Centauri, I doubt if many of them would place their bets on human survival.