Tourism, mining high value minerals for Earth, mining low value minerals for construction on Mars, manufacturing rocket fuel so that Mars can be the gas station for ships headed for the asteroid belt (enabling more high value mineral mining), low-gravity retirement communities for people with mobility issues who would be wheelchair-bound on Earth, real estate speculation, movies, sports, manufacturing space infrastructure (easier to launch things into orbit due to lower gravity), and basic science.
If I were living on Mars, I would absolutely not be willing to let the rare minerals get sent up into space then down to Earth. Learn to recycle, damn lazy Earthers.
If we can get enough minerals from space then we can stop mining on earth which is a horrible process that has horrible effects on the environment. make earth a park nature/nature reserve and move all the industrial base to space where toxins wont poison the rivers, and industrial waste wont kill the animals
I think you'd appreciate the complex manufactured items and goods requiring plastics that only Earth can export to you. If tons of mined materials or produced goods thereof were the cost, you would be keen to pay it.
Quick research shows that Martian atmosphere is 95% CO2. So if you had a fission / fusion reactor, one use of energy might be to extract carbon from the air. That would also generate oxygen btw.
I mean, sure, how can you expect to live a normal middle-class lifestyle without a few hundred tons of ytterbium? What are they going to want next? Lanthanum? Terbium? Praseodymium? Dysprosium? What else are we supposed to build our palaces out of, plain old ordinary gold? How impractical and gaudy would that be?
Everywhere but Earth is really inhospitable, but if it were up to me, I'd pick the Moon first, then Mars, then some asteroids, then way down the list — after we've got space industry sufficient to make planet-sized mirrors — then I'd pick the planet where the surface-level condensation is lead vapour in an acid pressure cooker.
Okay, asteroids presumably make economic sense due to mining potential, but otherwise - why the hate for Venus? What's so special about being on the surface of a planet? Just don't go to where the lead vapour is, enjoy the cloudy view from 50km above the surface instead.
Might be a monkey brain, but the mere possibility of falling 50km through crushing boiling acid is the kind of thing that'll stop me getting to sleep. More so than a deadly vacuum on the other side of a wall.
Yeah but iirc because of atmospheric density it's not crazy to build a floating habitat. At least no crazier then the tech required to get a crew and equipment to Venus in the first place
1) getting enough stuff out of Earth's gravity well
2) getting a reasonably self-sufficient population for survival and manufacturing of survival goods
But once you get there, the lack of a big gravity well makes this a lot easier. Low-G or zero-G is a lot easier to move stuff around at the small scales. How much could I lift on the moon?
I'm torn between a moon base and doing enough near-earth asteroid captures to build a space hab. Political support would probably be behind the moon base first, but a space hab built from captured asteroids might be cheaper.
Anyway, once you get a big enough base in space and some manufacturing, build a couple orion pulse nuclear ships, or some nuclear thermal equivalent to hop around the solar system quickly. Then we can probably start mining high value asteroids.
Then Mars and Venus start making sense.
Maybe we can find a closer brown dwarf than Proxima.
The one big thing that Venus has, and every other option does not - is earthlike gravity. That is a big deal, so I am all for exploring options of terraforming Venus to remove that acid somehow, because despite as Space enthusiastic as I am - living inside hot acid clouds is also not my dream.