Fallen Dragon, Peter F. Hamilton

A clean start on a fresh world. It's a desire that's hardwired into so many humans. It comes from our impetuosity and curiosity, the wanderlust gene. But it also has roots in the dissatisfaction with the society in which we live. How mush easier it is to move and start anew than to rectify the institutional, even constitutional, mistakes fo a monolithic social system. Between them, these motivators were enough to launch the first wave of colonies It was always going to be financially unviable... but still we went ahead.

p. 593

This is sort of the old idea that colonies can never solve the problems that they are trying o alleviate. Australia did not solve the problems of poverty and crime in England. Also, we often want to just walk away from fixing problems and start fresh and new and make the same mistakes again, only in the future, sparing us with dealing with the problems.

This whole section fo the book has some very interesting thoughts about society and social problems. Very nice.