Why not? Las Vegas was an empty desert once. Still is actually but that has not stopped it from being a boom town that diversified out of gambling.
A number of small and large Middle Eastern countries have little more than sand and oil and some don't even have oil but the countries that have even a little bit of gumption (Israel and Bahrain for example) do well with only sand.
Out there in the Solar System are worlds -- planets, moons, and the four largest asteroids -- that are dry dirt but humans have done far more with far less. Some economies barely have land. Bangladesh is flooded by the ocean half the year, the Maldives are going underwater, Naples is sinking, the Netherlands actually ARE below sea level, Louisiana is losing its southern parishes to the Gulf of Mexico, and islands in Chesapeake Bay are disappearing beneath the rising sea level (climate change deniers can deny the most brutal facts), but all of these places have economies. Bangladesh is a nation with a huge population. The Maldives have one of the most expensive resorts in the world. Naples builds boardwalks & a flood gate and shores up foundations and flooded basements. The Dutch are some of the world's best engineers. Louisiana residents move inland. Chesapeake residents simply move to the mainland. Other Americans simply let the oil companies destroy the planet. But this is about making a thriving economy when you have basically nothing. Space is literally nothing until you build it or until you set foot on the surface of another world. You are limited only by your imagination because the technology to farm and to build suburbs already exists.
On Earth, we rightly criticize developers for being insane maniacs who cannot rest until every tree has been bulldozed, burnt or fed to a wood chipper. Our oxygen is made by plants and fools think we will never run out of plants and trees until they encounter the Sahara or dead over-fished ocean.
Air is composed of approximately 21% oxygen, 78% nitrogen and other trace components. For the slow, oxygen and nitrogen are 99%. The morons in Congress who say carbon dioxide is good because "its plant food" miss several points. What plants? We are bulldozing the world's forests which are the world's lungs. That 99% is another point. Asphyxiation is another point.
The addition of any gas, except oxygen, to air reduces the oxygen concentration through displacement and dilution. Breathing as little as one or two breaths of air containing too little oxygen can have serious and immediate effects, including unconsciousness. Because there are no warning signs of reduced oxygen concentrations, our environment is extremely dangerous. Atmospheric oxygen concentration below 19.5 percent or above 23.5 percent? The entire human race could simply drop dead within a half hour.
I am not sure whom I blame more: devil developers or oil companies executives like Rex Tillerson and the Koch Brothers. That intro in Firefly may get it wrong. We won't use up the Earth and move on because we currently lack the ability to move the whole human population. More likely Mother Earth will simply choke us to death and then take her time over the next few billion years cleaning all the fracking carcinogens out of the aquifers and biodegrading the other toxic chemicals (along with our decomposing bodies). Perhaps Mother Nature will not allow another "intelligent species" to rise again on Mother Earth because the value of our "intelligence" is in question.
However, as much as I regard developers as anathema on Earth, environmentalists and developers could become the best of friends on dead lifeless worlds. How? Why? Simple. No one wants to live in a crappy neighborhood. Especially not the people who live in one. We know this because the minute someone gets a better job or wins the lotto or becomes a big time drug lord or a pimp or a politician or a rich preacher -- they move to the suburbs. It is really hard to tell these types apart because they look so much alike and their personalities are equally obnoxious. I will not insult used car salesmen by any comparison.
No one wants to live in a crappy neighborhood. Not on Earth. Not in space. Mostly rich people and well paid space workers will move to space. They are used to better things down here and will demand them up there.
When people demand nice homes and nice neighborhoods on other worlds in the Solar System and eventually nearby stellar systems, developers will smell money and start building them. People will miss trees and grass. That dry xeriscaping has its limits. Who will developers hire to build these new neighborhoods? Environmentalists. Who knows more about making plants grow than environmentalists and organic farmers and foresters? Homes in these paradises and gardens of Eden will fetch prices that we can scarcely imagine.
What happens when we finally venture to other stellar systems? How will our psychology change when even a middle class person can afford large farms, ranches and estates that would make one of our continents look small by comparison?
What will happen to burn-out used-up Earth? Can you say gentrification? If we can terraform other worlds (fixer uppers), then we can clean up the homeworld. I simply don't believe that one hundred percent of humans would write off the planet where our species got started. Historic preservationists, ecologists, environmental engineers, and social entrepreneurs will roll up their sleeves and gentrify the Earth. They will be aided in no small part by a new generation of police and prosecutors who execute polluters as the mass murderers they are.
As much as I find developers to be people unable to comprehend that destroying the environment on Earth (clear cutting forests) is suicide, I would cheerfully work with them on extraterrestrial projects because on dead lifeless worlds, there simply is nothing to kill. Our common purpose in space should be to green the universe both because we will then have air to breathe (not have to be confined to spacesuits) and because it will make us prosperous. I am proud to be a cold hard cash capitalist and a treehugger environmentalist. The two are one in the same. People who cannot see why green environmentalism cannot also be green moneymaking must love cancer, carcinogens and dying because that is what the oil/coal/fission economy has given us. It has given us pollution and war and terrorism and a declining America that resists innovation while the rest of the world moves to alternatives to fossil and fission.
To add insult to injury, the OPEC nations and oil rich countries are the biggest investors in alternatives to oil. Not to buy up patents and sit on them or to buy up alternative energy companies and then shut them down as American oil companies do but the Middle East investors (for example) actually expect a return on their alternative energy investment -- and they get it! They get a return and they get that new things like new technologies (space) and new businesses (tourists in space) are a lot better than war. They get it because they see their neighbors who harbor terrorists getting blown to bits. The USA lost the World Trade Center and the Murrah to terrorists and the US still does not get that war, violence, and hate are dead ends.
The future is not Star Wars and militarization of space. The US government (like the Chinese government) holds space treaties in contempt the same way it holds climate change treaties in contempt and most progress in contempt. The difference is that the Chinese are making big plans to colonize the moon. A shrewd realtor might open a real estate branch office in Hong Kong to sell lunar real estate with a reasonable assurance that Chinese landowners on the moon will have their claims and deeds backed up by the communist government.
The US meanwhile only claims to be a capitalist nation but the reality is that US space companies get the rug pulled out from under them by NASA (an agent of the US government) and members of Congress who say that the US should depend on other governments rather than let American companies create American jobs. The mistake was made back in the 1930's and 1940's when government decided that it would dominate space. Who owns cars? You do. Who runs the railroads in the US and around the world? Mostly private rail companies. Who operates merchant ships and the maritime industry? The private sector has been doing so since the first Caveman or Cavewoman floated on a log to get across a stream and then decided to make a dugout canoe. The Wright Brothers flew at Kitty Hawk and in only a decade or so there were the first airlines. We are still waiting almost a century after the first high altitude balloons and then high altitude planes for spacelines. Government is not the solution in space for America. Government is the problem as Ronald Reagan said. Sure, the Apollo landing on the moon must have been cool but then NASA had shuttles built to serve notice that it was a spaceline and would brook no competition. Last time I checked, state-run enterprises are communism. So after the shuttle program I mentally wrote off the government manned space program as evil but I kept a warm place in my heart for the unmanned programs and those beautiful Voyager and Hubble images.
That was until they announced that the director for the James Webb Telescope must have a top secret clearance. What does the James Webb Telescope do? Infra-red astronomical research of objects billions of light-years from Earth. In case you do not know, this means that it takes the light billions of years to reach Earth and enter the lens of our telescopes -- including the little telescope you might have in your backyard. Who, other than a psychotic control freak, would want to censor something as completely innocuous as distant objects in the universe? What dangerous maniac would want to censor knowledge of objects sending fossil light about their appearance billions of years ago? They might have long ago exploded or been sucked into a black hole. What sociopath thought it was a good idea to censor astronomy? What next? Will it become a military secret to exchange recipes for your grandmother's fudge? Will it be regarded as espionage to read books or to go to college to study Huxley's 1984 or the works of Yevgeny Zamyatin? Is there anything that is not classified? Are you at risk simply because you are curious about the universe? A scientist? Someone who is able to read? According to institutes who study such things, the USA is now rated as a nation with pervasive censorship. Pervasive is the highest level.
What does all this talk about classifying astronomy (sheer insanity), militarizing space, terrorism, climate change, the death economy (fossil & fission), and government regulation have to do with space real estate? Duh. Why do you think so many people want to go? Everyone: radicals, liberals, moderates, conservatives, reactionaries, and apolitical people who refuse to be on the right-left spectrum; everyone knows (since the NSA leaks) that our so-called leaders in Washington DC are certifiably insane. One could say stupid too since they refuse to act to reverse climate change when everyone from the military to reinsurance companies has been urging them to do something. So why wouldn't people say: "Stop the world, I want to get off!" ?
I have been giving all you real estate developers and real estate sales professionals talking points on how to sell space real estate. Contact me if you want the whole seminar of space law, space financing, space insurance, private space transportation, and of course space real estate. All these fields exist even if you have never heard of them.
And the money to be made is literally infinite.
