Like we keep being told that population will level out, but I've seen, what, HOLY CRAP, 4 billion people added since I was born, 3.7 --> 7.7.

Because we are totally on top of species depletion? And the world government totally is stable with China and Russia and the US and EU and North Korea and Islam-land and everyone trying to get nukes?

You know what is mind blowingly dumb? Wasting a trillion dollars a year on defense spending, in the US alone.

With China starting to get greedy over space, I think we'll see plenty of investment soon.

1) getting enough stuff out of Earth's gravity well

2) getting a reasonably self-sufficient population for survival and manufacturing of survival goods

But once you get there, the lack of a big gravity well makes this a lot easier. Low-G or zero-G is a lot easier to move stuff around at the small scales. How much could I lift on the moon?

I'm torn between a moon base and doing enough near-earth asteroid captures to build a space hab. Political support would probably be behind the moon base first, but a space hab built from captured asteroids might be cheaper.

Anyway, once you get a big enough base in space and some manufacturing, build a couple orion pulse nuclear ships, or some nuclear thermal equivalent to hop around the solar system quickly. Then we can probably start mining high value asteroids.

Then Mars and Venus start making sense.

Maybe we can find a closer brown dwarf than Proxima.

THEN, we can go for some nearby stars.