The most important members of the team, then, may not be the entrepreneurs and venture capitalists who put up the drive and the money, nor the engineers who build the hardware that makes it all possible, but the economists who try to work out the effect on the price of platinum when a mountain of the stuff arrives from outer space.

ECONOMIST: Mining asteroids: Going platinum | The

The collective effect may be to alter the ability of these ecosystems to provide critical goods and services to both mountain and lowland people.

UNESCO: Ecological Sciences and Research