I admire your Star Trek frontiersman spirit. Once we have warp drive and transporters we'll be in a better position. I think most of the AI driven space bot stuff is well on its way, including mining and manufacturing. THEY can do great stuff in space because they are already dead. With VR and telepresence we can experience most of what space has to offer sentient biological beings.

All the previous frontiers happened in a Biosphere and guess what, it wasn't exactly fun for the Natives and the Slaves who paid for it with their lives. I'll be impressed when they can make a city at the bottom of the Ocean first which would cost way less than making one on the Red Planet and be far less challenging. That's a frontier too.

The space frontier is slightly different. It's more like an amoeba in a drop of water getting excited about all that air outside its drop.

If warring were a survivable trait in space, I'm pretty sure we would have already been wiped out by a superior militaristic race many times over. Only one species on Earth thinks war is normal—the one that has the hubris to think we can settle space first and solve all the problems later.

We are at the beginning of long process and all those rockets and satellites and telescopes indicate a childlike capability and a potential to decouple from the mothership for a bit, though with fairly dire health consequences in our current form.

I could certainly see a Space Resort or two being constructed this century and a Space Tourism trade beginning but a permanent significant bio presence is a bit of a stretch given the state of the art and resources required and the actual payoff is not that great.

Wow, I'm living in a bubble on Mars and I hate living in a corporate techno bubble on a dead planet so far from home. Depressed. When's the next ship back to Earth?