Heh, glad my little blurb of regional pride had some useful info.

Very slight correction in that the reason timber didn't go east was that there was still local timber in New England. By the early 20th century with lower transportation costs and more deforestation back east it made some sense to ship logs, though California has always been the top destination. And canned salmon was a huge export to the East Coast (and Europe), but of course that's high value and easy to transport.

I would agree with both you and Tom that if anything on Mars will be of economic value it would be the volatiles for use in other space operations. Asteroids are probably a better bet for minerals but even that is unlikely in the near term. And I'll start listening to the lunar helium-3 people when fusion power is less than 20 years away (as it's been since 1970).

Mostly, my point was against those types who argue that if we just get governments out of the way, people can just plunk down thier little habitats and homestead Mars like the pioneers did Oregon. Such settlements were never self-sufficient in the sense of not needing resources and manufacturers from outside, and such colonization involved plenty of government help (Lewis & Clark were as much government employees as Armstrong & Aldrin). Most importantly, they were driven by the fact that there was something economically valuable to DO there.

There's a reason people settled in Oregon, or Virginia before that, or whereever, and they did *not* settle in Antarctica or the Sahara Desert. I think Mars is absolutely worth exploring, and by humans as well as robots, but in terms of settlements it's a hell of a lot more like McMurdo Sound than it is the Willamette Valley.

Now if we want to follow the Australian model and make Mars a penal colony that's one alternative. Given that many US states now spend more on prisons than universities (and have more inmates than students), maybe that's not so far-fetched.