The Psyche Project

An brief allegorical dialogue

Minister Chen: So let me understand this correctly, Ms. Rodriguez. You want to bring a mountain-sized asteroid into Earth orbit?

Elena Rodriguez: Not just any asteroid, Minister. Psyche 16 contains enough iron and nickel to supply humanity for millennia. We're talking about the end of resource scarcity, as well as the most profitable venture in human history.

Minister: That's... quite ambitious. Tell me what this looks like in practice.

ER: Today, steel costs around forty cents a pound. After Psyche 16, it will cost as little as two cents per pound. That’s a 95% savings. That means that conventional projects, like skyscrapers or bridges, will practically zero out their materials budgets. And unconventional projects become feasible: mag-lev trains, even a space elevator.

[gets excited]

Just think! The materials budget for major projects is about 40%, so we can cut costs by more than a third. We'll sell at tiny margins, maybe 2% above extraction costs, but on volumes measured in millions of tonnes.

Minister [guardedly]: It’s truly staggering to imagine. What's your timeline?

ER [calming down]: Eighteen months to capture and position the asteroid. Another six months to establish mining operations. So two years to begin, and after that, within another two years we're delivering materials at 95% below current market prices.

Minister: And you think the technology is ready for this scale?

ER: Minister, we've successfully tested our mining systems on three smaller asteroids already. The technology works. What we're proposing is scaling up proven methods to their logical conclusion.

Minister: Proven? I suppose, yes, but only with asteroids the size of office buildings. This is different by orders of magnitude.

ER: You're right that the engineering challenges multiply at this scale. Orbital mechanics become more complex, the mass we're manipulating is enormous, and our robotic systems need redundancy we've never built before. But the fundamental physics doesn't change. It will take time and effort, but our success isn’t in doubt.

Minister: That's exactly what concerns me, Ms. Rodriguez. I read your materials. Your projections say you’ll be supplying 30% of global demand within four years, and ramping up beyond that. What happens to our mining sector? We have 180,000 miners in this country alone.

ER: Well, naturally there would be downstream effects—

Minister: That’s an understatement. You're planning to make their entire industry obsolete in less than a decade. There are over 15 million people working in mining globally. They're not going to quietly accept unemployment so you can flood the market with space metal.

ER: Minister, look at the casualty reports from just this past month. The Sudanese copper-mine collapse, that’s forty-three workers crushed in tunnels that should never have been dug. The Chilean lithium extraction accident, that’s seven more dead from toxic gas exposure. This happens constantly because we're sending humans into inherently dangerous spaces with massive machinery. We can eliminate these deaths entirely while providing unlimited materials.

Minister: But the displacement will be massive and rapid. When you say “within two years”, are we talking about gradual job losses, or will the mining workforce disappear once your operations hit full capacity?

ER: Honestly, Minister, the thing that drives the timeline is market adoption. It could be gradual if we manage the transition carefully, or rapid if demand spikes for cheap materials. That's why we need regulatory frameworks and retraining programs in place before we start, not after.

Minister: But doing it in advance is precisely the problem. Back in the 1980s, when the UK and other places began closing coal mines, entire communities collapsed. That was almost a century ago and those areas still haven't recovered. You're asking me to approve a project that could bankrupt mining-dependent regions. What do I say to the people that live in them?

ER: You tell them their children won't die from preventable industrial accidents. You tell them their rivers won’t run orange with acid tailings and their lungs won’t be choked by diesel soot and blasting dust. You tell them their groundwater won’t carry mercury and arsenic down into the food chain, and their sky won’t haze over with sulfur and nitrogen fumes. You tell them whole mountains won’t be blasted into toxic slag fields, and that tailings ponds can start shrinking instead of spreading.

Minister: And I should also tell them that they’ll certainly lose their homes, because they will have no jobs and won’t be able to pay their mortgages?

ER: Minister, we're not the only ones developing this technology. The Chinese space mining consortium is eighteen months behind us, maybe less. They won't worry about domestic job displacement because they can simply mandate the transition. When Chinese asteroid materials start flooding global markets, our mining industry dies anyway, but we'll have no stake in the replacement economy.

Minister: You're asking me to bet our entire industrial base on technology that's never been tested at this scale, with social consequences we can't predict, all because you think someone else will do it first.

ER: I'm asking you to prevent thousands of deaths and megatonnes of pollution annually while revolutionizing human civilization. And yes, Minister, someone else will do it first if we don't. Count on it! The question is whether we shape that transition or have it imposed on us.

Minister: You want me to ignore democratic sentiment for a technology most people fear. The mining unions are mobilizing against this project, regional premiers would certainly withdraw support if we approve massive job losses, and established mining companies are spending millions on lobbying campaigns.

ER: Of course they are. They're fighting to preserve an industry built on worker deaths and environmental destruction. Entrenched interests always resist progress, until progress makes them irrelevant.

Minister: What you're proposing is not so much progress, but disruption. And on a scale we've never managed before.

ER: Because the benefits we can gain, extraction of unlimited materials safely in space, has never been available before! The speed reflects the gains.

Minister: That may be, but nonetheless, I can’t see fit to grant you the permits you need to proceed. I have an obligation to my voters, and they depend on me to protect their interests, and the sort of disruption you propose is certainly contrary to those interests.

ER: But Minister Chen, you can’t avoid that disruption! You can only ensure that the benefits accrue elsewhere! You're choosing future irrelevance and impoverishment out of fear of present difficulty.

Minister: To the contrary, Ms. Rodriguez, I'm choosing democratic accountability over technocratic dreams. That's not cowardice. It’s responsibility.

---

Asteroid mining is hypothetical, but driving automation is not. If your city or province or state or nation is impeding the introduction of robotaxis or driverless trucks to your community, I regret to inform you that you are being governed by Minister Chen.

Thanks to

Tomas Pueyo

, whose latest GeoHistory Magazine inspired this piece, and respect to

Kevin Kohler

and

Jeff Fong

for feedback on earlier drafts.

---

Changing Lanes on the Road

Last week I was a guest on the

The Econ Nerds

podcast, speaking about the future of transportation.

We covered everything from why Waymo's sensor fusion approach beats Tesla's camera-only strategy, to how driverless cars will reshape cities, to the regulatory and psychological barriers standing in our way. Plus I managed to win their transportation quiz (two out of three ain’t bad!).

If you enjoy Changing Lanes, you will enjoy this discussion. You can listen to it on Spotify, YouTube, or here on Substack:

Driverless Cars