I have been civli and provided facts to answer the question of why the future shown in Deep Range has not become reality.

The problem with experts like yourself is they enjoy taking something clear and simple and making it more complex then necessary. I guess it boosts their ego to argue over minutia and miss the big picture.

Yes, if John Marshall had built Sutter's sawmill a few miles down stream gold would not have been found at Sutter's mill. But it would still have been found shortly after American law and government reached California because folks didn't have to keep discoveries secret from a government whose taxes (Bribes and the royal fifth) made mining uneconomic accept for the richest ores.

if California had remained uner Mexican or Spanish ownership it would not have been "found" for decades as incentives to the discoverers to develop it, and create the economy that brought the railroad and steamships and modern technology to California would have been lacking.

Just compare Baja California to the State of California today if you really need proof of the importance of a nation's legal and economic system to development. The American state of California is richer then MOST nations in the world. Baja California is one of Mexico's poorest regions and what wealth it has is from rich American tourists, mostly from the U.S. state of California.

Do a similar comparison with Arizona and Sonora. Or today's Zimbabwe, begging for food and when it was Rhodesia under a capitalist system and the bread basket of Africa.

Did California's natural mineral and agricultural wealth just happen to stop at the border and it was just lucky America which has it. Or is it something else? Like the legal and economic system that created the wealth?

And to bring this back to space development, the answer is simple. Create property rights in space. Let explorers claim the resources they find. Then lunar mining and space development will move from science fiction into science fact. Then books like the Deep Range and the Man Who Sold the Moon will become reality. ER asked a reasonable question and I have provided a reasonable answer for it. That is not trolling.