Recently my interest has sparked in astronomy, I was a very adamant astrophile a few years back, that time when I had visited a public telescope centre to watch the stars through the lens of a telescope, I was absolutely amazed. That time I was so interested in astronomy, physics and maths but in particular I was more into astronomy, I used to always start lecturing my relatives and friends about planets, stars and other celestial bodies etc, I could continuously go on for hours & hours speaking about all that. I used to be obsessed with watching all those space documentaries on Television channels like National Geographic, Discovery, Discount science & etc. At that time I had decided, I don't know how old I was at the time, It was before my 7th grade, I know that for sure so maybe it was when I was grade 6, anyways I had told my parents that I wanted to pursue a career in Astronomy by becoming an astronomer, my mom opposed this and said that becoming an astronomer in India has no value, you won't end up becoming successful and what not, you know the typical Indian parent mindset which I will not write here cause that is self explanatory to everyone on the forum.
Now speaking on Moon mining or in general space mining, the latter which in layman terms means mining celestial bodies like Asteroids, moons, planets etc for useful resources like minerals. I think that in the near future, this will most certainly be a reality. If nations are having the ambitions to establish settlements on extraterrestrial bodies then space mining is a "necessity" because you can't constantly depend on supplies from earth as that would prove to be time consuming, too expensive and some other factors that I can't envision. We need to become an interplanetery species if humanity wants to maintain its existence and the ones of other lifeforms. In initial stages we would depend on only mechanical probes for this job, I think that unmanned probes are all that we need in space mining.