>>12097017Ignore all the braindead DUDE SCIENCE retards replying to you. Whenever you sail a ship to colonize another part of Earth, you're going there to enjoy the low entropy untouched land and extract that low entropy by shitting it up with settlements, hunting companies and mining operations, all directly usable things right on the spot by even the average Joe, at the low cost of one wooden ship.
The only thing you can get from going in Space is mining operations. This is basically a fraction of what colonialism awarded to nations and corporations participating in it. Furthermore comes the second issue: our material consumption is too low. Mining just one average-sized asteroid would oversaturate the reserves to the point that it was all for nothing because these resources are now worthless. In order for true solar system mining operations to exist, we would need habitats spread everywhere which would in turn generate the demand for the resources. Here's the issue - why would we do that? A habitat is a much more complex structure than Earth because it doesn't have a natural protection against radiation, it doesn't have a natural gravity, it doesn't have all these natural low-entropy low-hanging resources for us to enjoy, and most importantly - it cannot dissipate the heat that it generates. You have to do all these things yourself. Habitats are so unfeasible with the current tech that we will literally have zero progress on that front up to the next century. So where do these millions of tons of metals mined from asteroids go to exactly?
>tl;dr - we aren't going to space for AT LEAST another 3 generations and the complete stagnation until now should've been enough of a sign that this is the case unless you're retarded or deluded 
