Unfortunately, as humanity is urbanizing rapidly, so too are urban slums expanding and/or densifying. And they’re substantially all food deserts experiencing nutrition injustice. Asia’s largest slum, Dharavi, lacks sufficient infrastructure to provide sewage, water, electricity, or housing for residents, yet this dense community in the heart of India’s financial capital has a thriving informal economy with an annual economic output of up to $1 billion. It would be an even stronger driver of development if government leaders treated them as a population to be serviced, providing access to reliable land titles, security, paved roads, water and sewer lines, schools, and clinics. Rather than treating slums as a problem to be ignored, corporations could see slums as an opportunity to provide (not exploit) infrastructure and services needed, such as urban agriculture, while seeking government incentives, if needed, to make up margins. The local and global communities could also cease to see slum dwellers as characters worthy of pity. Urban centers, both in India and around the world, offer economic opportunities that rural areas do not. For this reason, some migrants voluntarily move to slums in hopes of learning new skills, setting up businesses, and sending their children to school. Therefore, encoding their dignity into the social consciousness – through social campaigns – can bring new life to deteriorating slums and serve as a driving force for community development.

Despite improvements in diversity of thought, and the celebration of individualism in our era, there still exists the unfortunate “danger of a single story”. Some examples include: male engineers stereotyped as being ‘on the spectrum’, while female engineers are anything but feminine; Every man on Wall Street is a Type-A alpha male, and all Wall Street women ‘wear the pants’; All housewives are certainly not intellectual, while all men want to work outside the home and become the breadwinner; Immigrants are poor, lazy and ‘the other’ while “we” are not. To free us to live out the purest version of who we are, we need a culture of radical acceptance. Corporations could set examples through their advertising such as the marketing of a vending machine, which responds to multiple languages, encourages the celebration of different nationalities within a community. The government could incentivize judges, law enforcement, and corporations through reduced tax incentives to obtain high acceptance scores from the communities they serve and employees they employ. All forms of media ought to refrain from characterizing groups of people or perpetuating stereotypes to avoid FCC penalties, although I am unsure of how this metric can be objectively measured.

Lastly, as the cost of satellite launches decline, the next generation of satellites may need to be manufactured on-orbit to reduce the cost of and thereby, a critical barrier to entry in space exploration. This will require the development of manufacturing factories for space and the refinement of our current robotic assembly platforms. The government would need to enact a law to refrain from 4- to 8-year visions for our space agency, in order to prevent a change in vision and subsequently, the redirection of resources, with every new political administration. A comprehensive 12-year plan supported by taxpayers through a referendum vote and supported by the government would also normalize aerospace contractor costs. The transparency and consistency of the space program would certainly eliminate the ill-suited contractors interested in hedging bets, while rallying the nation (and the world) – through social media, of course – behind an inspiring vision to lead humanity to the next frontier.