everybody familiar with economic history knows about the great tulip speculative bubble of the 1600’s in holland. people bid up the price of tulips to astronomical values. and then prices crashed.
What’s not so well known is the answer to the question...where did all the money to make this speculative boom come from...because...as far as we know this was the first known financial bubble of the modern age—or any age.
The answer to that question is in the spanish silver mines of the new world. There were a couple big ones in Peru and Mexico. Pirates like sir francis drake got only a small percentage of the vast troves of the metal that were shipped to europe from the new world.
Later in this century something similiar will happen with asteroid mining.
The cost and difficulty of space greatly exceeds the cost and difficulty of crossing the Atlantic.
The basic problem is that you never ACTUALLY run out of stuff on Earth - you just start getting ore concentrations that are unprofitable to mine, but that you could get whatever metal you want out of if you wanted to (or out of seawater.)
It’s just always going to be cheaper, if the supply of something gets short, to just go after low-concentration ores on Earth (plus recycling) rather than asteroids.