Indeed, Rui found himself agreeing with the essence of what she espoused. It was one of the reasons that he was so bullish on space expansion at such an exaggeratedly high pace.
They had the population. They had the human resources. There existed the material resources within their reach.
Then why couldn't they use them to conquer the world at a high pace?
Well, converting those raw material resources into warships and spaceships was very difficult. They had limited ship-building capacity aboard the Panamic Space Organization. They could build a certain number of ships every year, and even if they expanded that capacity every year, it would be extremely difficult.
That was a major bottleneck.
On top of that, conquering and colonizing stars required three things nominally:
Security.
Settlement.
Extraction.
