Hahaha thanks Scott.

But let me play around a bit with the thoughts around Mars vs asteroid mining and space stations.

A couple of things I have to re-emphasize.

Remember I am clearly stating I think there will be a Mars colony. And I do think that will be feasable long before Asteroid mining will be feasable. Certainly long, long before some kind of big spinning O'Neil Cylinder.

But here is the big BUT: There is now way anyone is gong to make some huge Mars civilization with 1 million people. That is what Elon Musk envisions.

You can get a couple of hundred adventurers going to Mars who want to push boundaries and put their name in history books. But there is not way you are going to get 1 million ordinary dudes to live on a planet which is a HUGE step back in every respect compared to Earth. No beautiful beaches, forests or lakes. All the soil is basically toxic. Cannot breath without donning a pressure suit. Every time you go outside it is like walking around Chernobyl. Way too much radiation.

Not to mention all the "fun" ways low gravity is going to screw with your body after you live on Mars for years.

If there was some economic advantage to Mars, people might setup operations there and just pay people a ton of money to work there. Yet Mars has no economic utility whatsoever. Nothing is easier to obtain on Mars than on Earth. Mars is known as a very difficult planet to land on, so bringing material down to it would not be fun.

Thus there is no incentive to live on Mars for most people. You would have to pay them a ton of money to do it.

Asteroid mining is different. As space exploration ramps up. Simply having a small colony on Mars to do science will increase traffic in space. That automatically creates a market opportunity for asteroid mining. There is money to be made selling fuel. Mining ice can be done by things like heating up the rocks.

Intially this production may happen on the moon. Starship today will require dozens of refuelings in orbit. By making fuel in orbit or on the moon you can significantly reduce that need.

A market for fuel production will create a market for solar cells. You may get solar cell manufacturing on the moon or in obit.

There will be a snowball effect. Every new product will create a demand for new manufacturing. Why? Because by manufacturing in space you can drastically reduce the need for launches from Earth.

There is a strong economic incentive there which can keep this process going for centuries until you got mega factories and space stations floating around in orbit.

Anyway I elaborated on this here: https://erik-engheim.medium.com/build-a-mars-civilization-or-an-asteroid-mining-empire-851d958fe9e4