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Resource Scarcity in the Far Future

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Bartleby

SOC-12
I really like the idea of having mining communities and drilling sites all over the non-mainworlds of my universe. Megacorporations all over asteroid belts and moons fits an aesthetic that jibes with my mind's eye.

Only I am not exactly sure what they are collecting and why.

With fusion energy fuel available from water and your neighborhood gas giant, resource scarcity looks a little different than it does in our 21st century oil drilling world.

What resources are scarce and valuable in your campaign? And why?

Some canonical suggestions include rare earth elements (lanthanum specifically) for ship engines. They could still be used in the future for electronics and the latest Tech F gizmos.

I also like the idea of some sort of mineral or compound or something that aids with refining fuel. That way we still have a rare resource collection being driven by fuel consumption.

Anything official I have missed? Anything else you have added?
 
Trade with low tech worlds that are not post scarcity, not allowed to mine the iron ore on the main planet to use as building materials. Most worlds are not exactly shirt sleeve environments, and some sort of housing is needed, nearly free power still does not produce the materials needed to build cities from nothing.
 
Rare Earth series elements such as are mined for modern RL electric vehicles would arguably be in higher demand in a society without fossil fuels relying more on an all-electric economy and industrial base. That would almost certainly necessitate asteroid mining, though they're almost certainly rare in space, just not as rare as on-planet.
 
I dont think it is easy to come up with plausible scarcity given known physics & chemistry, so i just invent some new physics described thusly (if anyone should ask)

"Elements have deep subatomic features underlying the familiar standard model, and it is the properties of those particles that give rise to advanced gravitics & and jump devices (etc). These deep subatomic features can only be found in nature, not manufactured."

Canonically there are multiple megacorps in mining & shipping. There has to be something very valuable they are doing to explain their wealth and power.

EDIT: rare earths or any other element arent good candidates for scarcity because at high tech levels you can just make whatever atom you want: we have unlimited cheap power with fusion and manipulate the fundamental forces with drives & shields
 
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Muonium for muon catalyzed fusion IMTU.

Given something like Titan that at this point looks like a huge hydrocarbon storehouse, might be huge naturally occurring veins that are still cheaper to mine even with space costs. Or effectively purer reducing post processing.
 
Bartleby said:
What resources are scarce and valuable in your campaign? And why?
Click to expand...
  1. Periodic table elements.
  2. Complex chemistry molecules.
  3. Skills and expertise (sophonts).
  4. Capital investment where it is ACTUALLY needed (as opposed to where it is actually being allocated).
Making elements out of other elements is always going to be Energy Resource Intensive™ ... so being able to find elemental resources "in the wild" that need little processing/effort to access and refine are always going to be valuable. However, there's also going to be a boom/bust "field of locusts" effect going on for these resources, such that once the easily obtained resource gets mined out the "demand" for that resource is going to move elsewhere (to pastures new).

The next step up is going to be complex chemistry. A lot of refined chemical products are also highly Energy Resource Intensive™ to produce, so finding feedstock precursors "in the wild" for those branches of chemistry can be profitable. In the Spinward Marches alone, there are a few Non-industrial mainworlds that have Fluid Oceans made up of non-water chemistry which can be collected and refined for industrial products and purposes. So "complex gas mining" from hostile atmospheres can also be a "scarce and valuable" resource to be extracted and exported.

Skills and expertise in your pool of sophonts is ALWAYS going to be an important resource that can be valuable (if not scarce) in campaigns.

And of course, capital for investments is quite often going to be something of a scarce resource. Even megacorportations do not have "infinite credits" to hand out/give away for whatever project or grant that comes along looking for funding.
 
Also Superheavy Stable Radioactives (eka-metals) like Onessium/Oganesson (which unfortunately is unlikely to be a metal like in Traveller lore, but also interestingly might not be a Noble Gas due to relativistic distortion of the outer electron orbitals skewing the periodic properties of the table - it could be a solid). Produced and thrown off from Supernovae or neutron star mergers.
 
vegas said:
"Elements have deep subatomic features underlying the familiar standard model, and it is the properties of those particles that give rise to advanced gravitics & and jump devices (etc). These deep subatomic features can only be found in nature, not manufactured.
Click to expand...

This seems somewhat similar to or related to the Traveller concept of a Metaconductor.
 
whulorigan said:
This seems somewhat similar to or related to the Traveller concept of a Metaconductor.
Click to expand...
Sort of. It is hardly unique to me to suppose a relationship between grav & J-drive (& i forgot to mention m-drive)

But different from the metaconductor (as described) this isnt a derived from chemical property ("doped ceramics") because that wouldnt be scarce in the far future with tech like the Imperium has. Instead its some hand-waved, rare property of some of the matter that is out there for the mining
 
I think the idea is at TL 15 you could probably synthesize almost anything you need with particle acceleration/nuclear dampers, etc,

However it would be wildly expensive… fusion power is cheap but its not free, and since FTL travel is also cheap…rather than refining a low grade ore on the mainworld, much better to go to another world that
1. may not be as crowded
2. may have a totally different geochemistry
mine the stuff there, then ship it back and refine it for cheap
 
Krikkitone said:
I think the idea is at TL 15 you could probably synthesize almost anything you need with particle acceleration/nuclear dampers, etc,

However it would be wildly expensive… fusion power is cheap but its not free, and since FTL travel is also cheap…rather than refining a low grade ore on the mainworld, much better to go to another world that
1. may not be as crowded
2. may have a totally different geochemistry
mine the stuff there, then ship it back and refine it for cheap
Click to expand...
Or more likely manufacture in place or very close and ship finished product.

My ur-example for this- beef. Railroads can and did ship the whole cow, but when insulated refrigeration was invented, they would ship just the sides of beef at great savings in wasted weight/volume and made it more affordable with greater range of slaughterhouse to market.
 
In small amounts I agree, once you have meson, damper and grav tech then you can manipulate the strong and weak forces and uses gravitic manipulation to minimise cross section.

The rate of production is still going to be very low without using a ridiculous amount of energy and very large facilities; for large amounts of exotic elements it is likely faster to go prospecting...
 
kilemall said:
My ur-example for this- beef. Railroads can and did ship the whole cow, but when insulated refrigeration was invented, they would ship just the sides of beef at great savings in wasted weight/volume and made it more affordable with greater range of slaughterhouse to market.
Click to expand...
(y)

Applying the analogy to high tech societies, the "dirty mining" gets done elsewhere (leave the pollution involved someplace else) and then you do "phase 1 refining" to discard a lot of the "useless mass" from whatever it is you've been mining (basically, throw away the dross that you're not interested in). That phase 1 refining happens "near" the resource extraction location and yields a product that can be commercialized for export.

So much like in the beef example provided, you don't ship the entire cow ... just the parts you intend to make a profit on.
Same deal can be applied to all kinds of resource extraction industries (chemical, metallurgical, agricultural, etc.) where there needs to be a significant amount of transport involved between producers and consumers.
 
So, given a FF&S1, TL12, smallest possible power plant, you get one thats 10 cubic meters, and produces 5MW. It costs 2MCr. Like everything else "starship", we'll give it a working life of 40 years. There's that 1% annual maintenance charge. The plant consumes 1 dTon of LHyd per month (at a 500Cr cost, which is arguably low, but...it is what it is).

NOT INCLUDING THE CAPITAL COST OF THE PLANT (i.e. 2M+ to buy and install it), the operating costs (i.e. fuel and maintenance), with a 3% inflation adjustment over 40 years turns out to be < 0.0015 Cr per kWh. Not "too cheap" to meter. But pretty darn cheap. If a house consumes a solid 1 kWh, 24x7, that's ~$13/year in power costs.

The plant could be purchased with a 10 year 5% bond, to service 5000 residents, paying about $55/month in a special assessment just to pay the bond back. After 10 years, they just pay their usage rate.

And this is a small plant stuffed in an outbuilding next to a 1 dTon LHyd tank that gets topped off each month by Franks CO2 and Hydrogen service. It's built in the center of the substation for distributing the power to the local community.

At TL15, you can install a .6MW fusion plant for 20,000Cr that runs on 9L of LHyd each month. It sits in a box smaller than your water heater. This is certainly, "too cheap to meter". Heck, we buy more than that in bottled water each week lol. Granted, 20KCr is more than a water heater, but it's less than I paid for my solar array. And I'm not getting .6MW :) "Honey, we can get that garage arc furnace you always wanted for casting miniatures!"
 
IMTU they go after the cores of dead planets that have had their surface stripped, such as in white dwarf systems, partially as it doesn't need to be refined, and also it is like a giant billet of hammer forged steel. Other things as well, though that is one.
 
vegas said:
EDIT: rare earths or any other element arent good candidates for scarcity because at high tech levels you can just make whatever atom you want: we have unlimited cheap power with fusion and manipulate the fundamental forces with drives & shields
Click to expand...
Rare Earths aren't even a great candidate for scarcity here on contemporary Earth. They aren't all that rare -- what they are, is messy to extract and refine. That's why most of that process gets offshored (by the "First World" economies).
 
RossWinn said:
The idea that much of anything is "scarce" in a fusion powered, star faring society is a lot of mental gymnastics.
Click to expand...
Assuming Demand won’t rise to meet Supply (64 kb is all anyone will need)

I could easily see TL 15 factories running in the TW on a regular basis.
 
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