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Note that the value of the asteroid field tends to be heavily, heavily overstated. The entire asteroid field combined is only 3% of the mass of the moon, well under 1% of the mass of Earth's crust. Ceres alone is about 40% of the entire asteroid field's mass, and Ceres, Vesta, Pallas, and...

Note that the resource they're measuring in that link is entirely Carbon Footprint, ie. fairy dust. It explicitly doesn't measure cropland, fishery depletion, or other actually useful numbers. And if you go off actual carbon footprint... the richest 10% produce around half of all the carbon...

Yeah... but as the subject was "Why asteroids aren't being mined" it's kinda pointless to speculate about several hundred years after that in reference to that specific question.

Okay, I'll grant that's theoretically possible in a sufficiently advanced scenario, but I think you maybe don't realize how big a jump you just made there. We were talking about hauling a single asteroid back to earth for the first time and why it won't make a profit, and then suddenly a...

You honestly believe random groups of crazy ideologues can afford an O'Neill cylinder? That's like building a business to manufacture Aircraft Carriers to sell to the Mafia. Besides which, the first time a group of idiots kill everybody on an O'Neill cylinder, which is going to happen really...

Actually going and getting an asteroid would glut the market for metals so much the value of metals in the asteroid would drop below the cost to mine it. You can't just throw a cubic kilometer of platinum into the free market and think it's still going to trade at the same price as when the...

70% of the earth is already free of humans. Job well done everybody.