The law of supply and demand applies. If you flood the market with a billion tons of high quality ore, the price will go down to near nothing.
...and if there’s not $10,000 quadrillion or wealth in existence, then it’s pointless to assign such a value without all the qualifiers that are being mentioned.
The cost to mine, refine, and transport a product to market is not zero. The overall costs to mine and transport an asteroid’s materials have to be less than the value of the end product to achieve profit and justify the venture.
Materials in the ground are not counted as a reserves, unless there is a established economical extraction process allowing at minimum a return on the investment (ROI).
This is the situation shale oil faced in past episodes when price bbl. dropped due to OPEC manipulation. Extraction costs were eventually reduced enough to allow shale oil production to continue with OPEC oil in the $(50-60) bbl. range.
Exactly.
“The law of supply and demand applies. If you flood the market with a billion tons of high quality ore, the price will go down to near nothing.”
On the other hand, having the cost of iron, nickel, copper, titanium, gold, and silver drop to near nothing would be a tremendous economic boost. Want to build a space city? Spin it for ‘gravity’ and give it really thick walls? No problem.