I haven't been hanging around TB that long.

I'm just trying to make a point that usually slips past the space groupies that hang around sites like this. (No slur intended, I'm an SG myself, and proud of it).

Unlike tea (clippers to China), or silver (galleons to Mexico), or slaves (caravels to Brazil) or even guano (windjammers to Chile) there is simply nothing out in space that makes economic sense, from an extractive or manufacturing point of view. There is nothing there worth the cost of getting and working there. We don't even have any idea there might be something there worth a wildly optimistic speculative investment.

That may change, if we find cheaper ways to travel to and work there, or stuff valuable enough to make it worth our while. But for the time being, there is nothing there that makes economic sense, no matter how entrepreneurial we are, or how far seeing we think. Real businessmen, and real stockholders who aren't space groupies, will not be impressed.

I'm sorry if I misunderstood your point, but bear with me too. Those of us who feel very strongly about space travel's importance to the long term health and survival of the species need to think clearly and realistically, or we will be dismissed as a bunch of crazy dreamers with nothing worth contributing.

Columbus was a visionary, but he died broke. And people without any of his vision got very rich, and it wasn't in the spice trade he tried to pioneer, either.

The only spice the New World had to offer was tobacco, a dangerous drug. Things never turn out quite the way you expect them to. In fact, that's what I'm putting my money on.