Rare Earth Crisis Suggestion

I thought it could be cool if having an advanced space program (or perhaps the mars program?) could help reduce the rare earth problem. The idea is asteroid mining!

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That’d be great! Currently running a game where I have to back off on maxing out technology to avoid that crisis, even though all of the things that help lower the rare earth crisis are maxed out. The Private Space Industry benefit even lists asteroid mining as one of the benefits, so that might be another small source of rare earth. Mars Program seems like a great fit for a larger source with a long inertia delay.

The thing with Asteroid Mining is, if we took it seriously, it’d totally be doable. With a LOT of upfront investment. In a couple decades. Which is when it’d successfully begin mining.
So this is very hypothetical and very much future-bound. The first company to accomplish this will get extremely rich, but the RnD and general risks are so crazy high, it’s unlikely to actually genuinely be attempted soon even though in principle we should have the tech, or something nearly like the tech that we need.

In this sense it’s both too far into the future and too speculative to actually make it into the game.
I think this could be something to add for a futurist expansion later down the line but the base game probably shouldn’t have this.

Currently when crisis appear implement green electronics and rare earth drilling subsidies as soon as possible.
Also keep foreign relations maxed out.

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Depending on the country you play as, Rare Earth Crisis may or may not be able to be gotten rid of once it hits too high a value, because maxing green electronics and rare earth drilling won’t be enough to get it below the green trigger. But if you act quickly enough, those two measures definitely suffice. (Which is actually potentially unrealistic. Rare Earths are genuinely rare earths and most countries have next to none, so if you don’t have the necessary reserves, you can mine for it all you want. You just won’t get anything.)

Have green electronics initiative, rare earth drilling subsidies, and foreign relations maxed out. Maybe it’s the year, since I’ve been running Canada for a while, but still need to ease off of maxing out technology to avoid the crisis because tech’s influence on the crisis is exponential. Hovering around 90% tech seems to stay out of the danger zone.

Sounds like some combination of implementation delay and inertia should be able to represent that long delay. And if both the Mars Program and Private Space Industry were potential sources of rare earth, we could also increase the difficulty of maintaining the Private Space Industry situation by having state programs compete with it, just like state schools reduce private schools or state pensions reduce private pensions.