Comment by cuboidGoat

I think there will be two things. One is economics, fetching asteroids could be very big business, and the other is political, space will be viewed as freedom of a sort, given the kind of restrictions that may be in place on Earth by then, with the climate transforming alongside having a lot more people than we do today, even if growth slows down, which is far from certain. We could easily be in the age of what Bruce Sterling refers to as the Khaki Greens, aka, militarised enforcement of ecological protection.