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Doesn’t choosing to leave those things “out there” imply pretty strongly that we could economically get them? I’m not convinced that’s true. Getting to the asteroid belt is not energetically cheap, and the trip itself would take years and require that any crew taken along bring food water, and life support sufficient for a 2+ year journey. At current launch costs, you’d have to bring back a lot of minerals to break even.
O’Neil cylinders would enable space farming, but again, we have the difficulty of sourcing the materials to build the cylinder, the energy to launch it all to wherever you want to build it.
I think all of this points to the problem I have with over-romanticizing space exploration. We sort of have an unfounded assumption (probably because of poor analogy to sea-exploration) that you can sort of just find or get the resources on the way. That works on the ocean. Out of food? Go fishing. Out of water? Get some on the next island you pass. You won’t run out of air because obviously you never left Earth and you can breathe the atmosphere on the boat. In space, you have to bring it with you. All of it. And worse, you have to launch it or the tools and materials to make it from Earth. The free lunches that sailors got simply don’t happen in space. If you’re in space, water either has to be brought along, recycled, or chemically manufactured. Food either must be brought along, or you must bring the seeds and everything required to grow, harvest, and preserve them. The fuel is the same situation, either you bring it, or you manufacture it. The free lunches don’t happen. In fact space is probably one of the most dangerous places to be. You can’t breathe in space, it’s too cold for survival. There’s no food or water. That’s before considering the radiation that would be dangerous to humans, or the asteroids that can smash tge ships protecting astronauts from exposure to space.
Yeah, hence:
Would be part of a two-pronged strategy. Get as many materials as you can that are already in orbit, and convert those to productive uses in orbit.
Transferring foodstuffs to the ground is a lot cheaper, once you've already grown them. Or to the nearest actual colony, if we get that far.
Fuel costs is probably the only truly unavoidable one, it is possible to be 'stuck' in space in a way that's not quite true in the ocean, if you have no more energy or no more materials that can be used to transfer momentum.
But there are options that are less reliant on bringing fuel with you (railguns/space cannons, solar sails, space elevators, to name a few). Massive engineering challenges for each, though.
More options
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