Solar system beyond Earth is more like a desert, possibly rich with resources, but nearly no resource is precious enough to be worth carrying by a starship.
The incentives for space expansion past LEO and GEO will not be economical.
> I'll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people setting the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever writes "Gobi Desert Opera" because, well, it's just kind of plonkingly obvious that there's no good reason to go there and live. It's ugly, it's inhospitable and there's no way to make it pay. Mars is just the same, really. We just romanticize it because it's so hard to reach.
"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers,"
and:
"640K ought to be enough for anybody."
We're really bad at predicting how things will change. Who would have thought that Tim Berners-Lee would be a link in a chain to Donald Trump's election?
I’m genuinely curious about the economics of doing more in space than putting up satellites.
Short term: a wonderful tourist attraction. You can nearly fly.
Long term: people with muscular / bone disabilities who cannot withstand Earth gravity. An interesting retiring home (for a narrow wealthy set, of course).
A more proper comparison would be Klondike. Inhospitable, barren Arctic land, rather hard to self-sustain, really easy to die. It was only interesting because of the rich gold deposits.
Compared to that, Moon is like 100x the hardships of Klondike, but without the gold, and a ship back to Earth is so expensive that any cargo costs more than gold by weight. Or, at least, so it is now.
There are no immediate economic incentives to settle on the Moon or Mars or even further away. But there are non-economic incentives, much like those which produced the Mayflower.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Manned_Space_Program
How significant are those in practice?
The colonisation of the world by Europeans started with government investment, but eventually became self-sustaining.
If these offworld colonies are free of political correctness, crime, taxes, welfare systems, and disease, and contain only beautiful, healthy, and intelligent people (via careful selection, including genetic screening and IQ tests, of permitted colonists), they could draw the best of humanity to them.
The GULag system was just one collection of data points. The nuclear weapons reservations, space launch complexes, and bio-weapons towns were others.
The experience was not, on average, considered inspirational.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railroad_Tycoon
Edit My point isn't to disparage Bezos, but to highlight the fact that anyone with grand aspirations in orbit/solar system will have to go through Musk and Spacex until a competitor does appear. RE space colonies, I believe the natural sequence of events for space tourism is: sub orbital, oribital, long term orbital (a small space "hotel") culminating in orbital habitat ala O'Neil Cylinders. Cheap kg to orbit enables all of that.