This isn't crazy at all, it's just outside of most people's experience. You just have to supply the relevant information, so people can understand. Here, I'll do it myself. (You should pay me more for this.) Picture a jar. Not a special jar that I have to explain to you. Just an ordinary jar. Put some gold in it. Just a little bit, ground to the consistency of fine sand. Now some iron. And some uranium. Don't worry, it's not very radioactive in this state. You can touch it with your hands. Just pour it in. Now some tungsten. Surprisingly heavy, huh? Some platinum. Then just keep adding other heavy elements. Sticking to the useful ones. Should be pretty easy. They're all useful for something. Jar about half full? Now pour in some really fine sand. Put a lid on it. Now shake the jar for 4 billion years. Don't worry, it's just an imaginary jar, and an imaginary 4 billion years, you're not going to get bored or anything. Now reach your fingers into the jar, and fish out a nugget of gold, or tungsten, or iron. Oh, wait. You can't. It's all at the bottom. Under a thick layer of sand. Can you picture it? Are you picturing it clearly? Close your eyes if it helps. Wait, no, open them again so you can read this. That jar is Earth. All the heavy stuff has sunk to the core. Where you can't get it. Now smash the jar on the floor, and pick up the precious metals and the useful ones.... easy, right? The smashed jar is asteroids. Right now, your brain is saying "Oh, I see, he's talking about asteroid mining. He's saying we're going to go out and mine asteroids." No. I'm saying we already are. When the Earth was molten, all the heavy stuff sunk to the core. We covered this. So how are we mining heavy stuff on Earth right now? The answer is that we are mining asteroids. We are mining asteroids that hit the Earth after it stopped being molten. So the stuff in them stayed on the surface. Pretty much every mine on Earth is an ancient asteroid strike. Now think of all the asteroids in the solar system. Divide them into two categories. The first category is the ones that have already hit Earth, sometime in the past. The second category is the ones that haven't. I'll save you the trouble of asking an AI. The first category is about .001%. The second is about 99.999%. Everything you have, everything you own, everything you ever made, everything that your entire civilization is made out of, unless it's made of wood or entirely out of light elements.... it all comes from that .001%. The 99.999% is out there in the rest of the solar system. Now do you understand? You, and I, and Elon Musk, and your sweet old granny, all of us, we grew up under conditions of grinding material poverty. We just don't see it that way because we have nothing else to compare it to. We're used to it. Are you starting to get the idea? Good, but we're not done yet. Now we're gonna talk about energy. Here on Earth, we pull hydrocarbons out of the ground and burn them for energy. We could build fission reactors, but dumbass hippies made some movies, and now the retarded theater kids who run our government won't let us do that. They want us to go back to windmills, because they are retarded. Windmills suck. Hell, even hydrocarbons suck. Fission is okayish, but the real energy source, the only one that matters in the long run, is hydrogen fusion. On Earth, we can't really build fusion reactors that actually produce energy, despite the best efforts of engineers. That's not because the engineers are dumbasses like the theater kids. No, engineers are smart. They still can't do it because it's really really hard, unlike running a government. Perhaps someday they'll succeed, but in the meantime, we're stuck burning hydrocarbons, until we hang all the theater kids and build fission plants instead. But in space, there's a giant free fusion reactor waiting for us. In fact, we've been using it for millions of years. We call it the "sun". In space, energy is free. Oh, you have to invest in some solar panels, and they're only useful close to a star, but that's just nitpicky little details. Basic idea is that there's no power bill. Build solar panels once, run 'em almost forever. On Earth, solar panels suck, and they're only useful for grid independence. But in space, with nothing between you and the star but, well, space, then solar panels are awesome. And all the material and energy you need to build them is right there for the taking. So, cheap material, free energy. What else does a civilization need? Computation? Well, guess what you can build a lot of with cheap material and free energy. What this really all boils down to is that the only thing Earth has going for it is that it's a really nice place to build your house. It's a crappy place to build a mine or factory. The total value of everything off Earth — and I'm just talking about the solar system, not the rest of the universe — exceeds the total value of everything on the Earth by eleventy-billion percent. In the future, most of us will continue to live on Earth, unless we really screw it up by not hanging all the theater kids. But all the mining, all the manufacturing, all the making the stuff, and all the making the stuff that makes the stuff, will happen in space. And there will be a lot more of it. All we have to do is get the tools we need from down here where we built them, to up there where we need them. So that we can build more tools out there, more and more and more of them, forever. There's only one snag. It's really hard to get things off Earth. We haven't really done much of it until very very recently. SpaceX is the "very, very recently". SpaceX now owns about 80% of humanity's lift-to-space capacity, and no one else is even close. That's 80% of the pipeline to infinite wealth. And first dibs on all the real estate out there, too. In the old West, the railroads were money trees, because they didn't just own the transport, they owned the destination. And there's about to be a frontier again, except this one's bigger, and it comes with a built-in second industrial revolution. Make sense now?