Whereas gigantic spaceships, fuel, refining facilities and the labor to build and operate them will be free?
Let’s face it, if gigantic corporations can find myriad ways to exploit working-class stiffs on Earth today imagine how much worse the problem will be when the company you work for literally owns the air you breathe.
It’s never been about shortage of resources. This planet has more than enough to keep every single human being alive today well-fed and well cared for. It’s about equitable distribution of those resources.
Ah, you’ll see bruh: The moment a block of gold the size of a minivan is brought to earth, the economy will stop working entirely. Nevermind an iron rock dense enough to build everything anyone could need, or a hydrocarbon crystal.
I sure hope the person who brings such a resource back to Earth turns out to be some working-class guy with a homemade rocket ship who just wants to share the wealth with everyone instead of a huge transnational corporation that is more interested in pursuing value for its shareholders than in building an equitable society.
I’m trying to understand the future you’re envisioning, and why it’s so dramatically different economically. As others have mentioned getting the resources here from space will be very costly, but for the sake of argument let’s imagine there’s a huge mountain of pure iron sitting on earth in an easily accessible location, free for the taking. How does that dramatically change the world’s economy, other than putting a few ore miners out of work? It would still need to be re-worked into something useful. Processing and alloying it with other elements into steel is energy intensive. And then making things out of the resulting steel involves a lot of other processes. The cost of raw materials is generally NOT the majority of a final product’s price tag, unless you’re talking about gold or diamond jewelry.
I don’t think there is any reason to bring much of anything back to earth. But I do think if we start mining it will be to build stuff IN space, as building on earth and launching into space is the costly bottle neck.
