The earth has a wide variety of resources important to comfortable human life. The moon has rocks and sand and sunshine. Moon mining is but one of the prerequisites to living cheaply in space.
Yes. We'll probably move into space only after we are good into autonomously turning water, organics and some rocks into comfortable habitat. Not earlier.
That is probably not too far away. We are getting very good into semi-autonomous transformations, and at turning anything into the materials we want.
If this were true, one would expect life on earth to differ dramatically from what one observes today. A lack of necessary materials keeps billions of people in poverty.
