What off-Earth resources? (was Because that's whethe people are)

--- In spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com, Joe Strout wrote:
> On 3/8/12 8:43 PM, hitssquad wrote:
> > > why produce goods and materials on Earth
> > ...Because that's where the people are.
> Ultimately the population off Earth will vastly outnumber the population on it.

That was essentially the claim the original question "Why?" was addressed to. Also, I'm not sure it's compatible with your earlier claim:

"
But if we're going for realistic, we should probably speculate that
by the time space colonies become practical in any serious way, we'll
probably already have mind uploading

"

Where would these quintillions (you did say "vastly outnumber") of off-Earth people get their nitrogen -- from Titan and Triton?

> The rest of the solar system is [...] full of resources

The mystery remains what those resources might be. There's hydrogen and helium in the gas giants, though that's unavailable until starlifting technology is developed (yes, I'm calling the gas giants stars -- small, cold stars). There might be rocky cores in the gas giants, with Jupiter's "a mass of from 12 to 45 times the Earth's mass" (Wikipedia), but again those will remain unreachable for some unknown amount of time. There might be a lot of platinum-group metals in the asteroids -- whose value might crash if anyone actually started mining them, negating one of the reasons for doing the mining.

Is there anything else?