[elihu]

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.

[einpoklum]

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.

[smegger001]

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

[gridspy]

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.

[vlovich123]

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.

[elihu]

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?