My previous post on this was a bit of a fantasy that described how dropping the value of heavy earth metal to dirt levels wouldn't be that disruptive outside of those particular industries, so I'll give the most realistic version here:Basically at that point you're hitting a situation where money as a form of exchange becomes meaningless and you're back to straight barter.
Which it wouldn't surprise me all that much if that's how global economics already works. And then we just sort of throw a money figure on it to make some domestic sense of it.
But all economic systems are modeled around scarcity of resource. A virtually unlimited supply of x... that's something new.
But I guess it's really not virtually unlimited. Maybe the supply is, but the extraction and delivery isn't.
Even in the most optimistic view, the extraction of heavy metal resources on an asteroid will be very expensive. The impact of introducing asteroid metal into Earth's economy will likely happen very gradually over generations. There is just no cheap way to move the contents of an asteroid safely to a processing plant on Earth. Optimistically it's going to go from billion dollar research ventures to barely profitable over several generations.
And really, I think when we get to the point where it's possible we'll probably want to keep most of it out of the gravity well anyway. An entire industry will be created in orbit before we get our first big asteroid, and that industry will need the same materials in those asteroids.
So, we'll have a drop in resource scarcity of heavy metals when we start asteroid mining in the same way we've had an energy surplus since we invented solar panels in the 1800s.
Note: The above is void when we invent an Epstein drive via radio frequency (RF) resonant cavity thrusters.
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