Cyberpunk, Space Travel, and Setting Design

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Arith Winterfell

Space and asteroid mining results is enormous resources in terms of both building materials, energy, and rarer earth metals than we have today. This would seem to imply post-scarcity. ?

Without magic technologies you'll only get really common materials out of asteroids. The gold and paltinum group metals that inflate value estimates are widely dispersed through the iron and nickel. Without massive amounts of fusion power or magic nanites what you're going to get out of metalic asteroids is iron and nickel. These are useful industrial metals but nobody's going to get that rich off of supplying them.