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That worked well for grain-farming civilizations; I don't know if there was a celibate class of priests/shamans/full-time religious people in pastoral societies. Space colonization could work, but conditions up there are a good deal more hostile than Antarctica and as such it's going to be expensive as all hell. Not like you can load a boat with a bunch of convicts and send it over to Australia or something.
Being expensive and difficult might be a good thing. It would thus require more minds working to make it successful and efficient.
I s'pose you could have a bunch of high-status maybe-celibate people working on the space program as support staff for the space colonists? But that too is expensive as hell. Monasteries used to be at least theoretically self-supporting; the monks brewed beer or made cheese or whatever. Can that space mining program pay for itself by bringing back a bunch of gold or something?
Yes.
There's incredible mineral wealth floating around up there. A bit hard to get it down though.
Yeah, the space mining has to turn a profit. And not become a victim of its own success by crashing the price of gold or whatever it is they're mining.
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