The Expanse- questioned

Having a disagreement with an old friend about the course of human history and the course of manned space travel, with its historical failings and its future of privatised corporate ownership and military/ police state guardians. It is very hard to divorce the speculative dreams of our youth and our fantasy of what space could be, opposed to what history has always shown us what exactly the expanse, would actually look like. And if the espanse just shows us, the same old tired, cowboys and monsters and corruption, of police states and prisons and murder mysteries, why would we hold these visons cherieshed to our hearts. Couldn’t, shouldn’t our dreams of space opera envision something more profound, more interesting than the exploitation of the expanse? 

Is space opera just the same reality that we must live through every day, located in a spaceship, a space station, backdropped worlds, rather than, a car commuting to cities, across towns over highways, patrolled by cops. Ruled by politicians. Fueled by greed and stupidity ?

So the Expanse is just our reality, floated off world- and you can tell this is fact because

In the worlds of the expanse, there is no great Artificial Intelligence, computation is virtually the same as ours, now. 

There is also no contact with alien life, we don’t enact first contact drama, we don’t get to wrestle with the exploitation of other beings' homeworlds. Or interact with aliens at all. Humans, we, find all of the other planets dead and ready for mining and harvest, no other life, no roadblocks to our colonists. 

I know ! I hear you screaming about the Protomolecule.

What about the entire plot of the first season and books? 

Well the Protomolecule is nothing but a plot device which takes us into the road movie medium. But yeah, in space. We get to tour the universe, with lovelble rebels and defenders of all that is good and noble of mankind.

Fuck.

The protomolecule is used up and exploited to show us the greed and horror of corporations, and business people. Then cast aside and sent away. 

When it is brought back again, it merely leads us to more lifeless universes, to be manifest destined to shit. To be land grabbed, back stabbed and again the protomolecule is shown to be irrelevant. 

Why can’t humans envision a universe that isn’t a ghost town. 

The expanse is nothing but a character driven drama, that could be a western, or a mystery, or about a bar, or coffee shop, in the frontier, filled with all the sexism and racism one could crave. With all the stereotypical characters. The hero, white, the sidekick, specialists, gunslinger, white, the love interest, exotic, belter, POC, the genius engineer, XO. the loveable spaceship, weapons platform. Foul mouthed politicians, two dimensional dirtbags and bad guys. 

Oooo, but they live in asteroids. 

Fuck you. 

This show, these books are the perfectly encapsulated reason not to go to space. 

Why we as a species should never expand, 

Or be 

The expanse.