Dear Mr. Rux:

All of what you said (which I have removed for the sake of brevity in
this response) is on point.  However, the post which I was responding to
phrased things very much in terms of the inhabitants of a world being
native to it, and building infrastructure as they reached out into space
for the first time, and presenting that as the typical case - which, I
submit, it is definitely not (in the OTU).  Much more commonly, IMO,
infrastructure will grow from the top of the gravity well down, not from
the bottom up by a culture starting with chemical rockets and eventually
  progressing to interstellar travel.

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Kelly St. Clair
xxxxxx@efn.org