Like many Rust-Belt cities crawling from the wreckage of Dickensian industrial society, Erie continues to frantically claw at any available opportunity to supplant losses in her once-robust manufacturing sector.
The intergalactic publicity would naturally draw visitors from across all of creation, and we’d all be here to satisfy their insatiable desire for cheap tourist crap, which would be a whole other industry unto itself. Think about it. We could be the townies of the galaxy, selling overpriced “We Love Erie, the Capital of the Milky Way Galaxy” T-shirts, ashtrays, and 3-foot-tall fluorescent novelty beer steins from roving pushcarts. The economic impact on Erie would be substantial.