England : America :: Callisto : Earth (was It takes a lot of nitrogen)

--- In spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com, Joe Strout wrote:
> I think this is vastly underestimating the amount of valuable real estate in the solar system. [...] I see the whole system eventually teeming with inhabitants, ranging from solar orbits closer than Mercury, to the asteroid belts, to the Jovian and Saturnian systems, all the way out to the Kuiper belt. [...] the Earth will start to seem like a historically important, but relatively small part of civilization -- much as England seems to us Americans

Except the reverse makes a better analogy:
England : America :: Callisto : Earth

It's as if humans started out on Callisto (.018 Earth masses), eventually migrating to Earth (48% of the free rocky mass of the solar system), and centuries later were told they should set out again for hundreds of vastly smaller objects -- most much smaller than Callisto -- because of some supposed "[vast] amount of valuable real estate in the [rest of the] solar system".

The truth is, other than gas and the inner planets, there's virtually nothing out there. There *is* a rocky-metallic mother lode in the solar system -- but you're already standing on it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Solar_System_objects_by_size

And that isn't even the real resource, which is nearby people. People could be densely placed somewhere else, but then they wouldn't have access to the mother lode, so what sense would it make in terms of resources?