What if asteroid mining crashes the outlook for a key metal?
A space-mining breakthrough is a long-dated supply-glut narrative for one metal: it nicks Freeport (copper beta) on a softer long-run price outlook, but the cascade is rightly tiny - first ore is years away. No real analogue exists; the closest mental model is the 2012-15 mining-capex bust that compressed miner multiples on a demand/supply rerating. Skeptic: physics and unit economics make near-term terrestrial displacement implausible, so this is a sentiment/headline knock on miners and a long-horizon optionality story, not a deliverable-price event.
Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.
The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 3–10 years horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a mixed shock. A commercial asteroid/space-mining breakthrough crashes a key metal's price outlook. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Industrial demand ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.