Pet peeve: > rare earth metals like gold, platinum, rhodium, ruthenium, iridium Not one of those is a rare earth metal. The complete list of rare earth metals

Pet peeve: > rare earth metals like gold, platinum, rhodium, ruthenium, iridium Not one of those is a rare earth metal. The complete list of rare earth metals: cerium (Ce), dysprosium (Dy), erbium (Er), europium (Eu), gadolinium (Gd), holmium (Ho), lanthanum (La), lutetium (Lu), neodymium (Nd), praseodymium (Pr), promethium (Pm), samarium (Sm), scandium (Sc), terbium (Tb), thulium (Tm), ytterbium (Yb), yttrium (Y). Rare earths are also, despite the name of the group, not particularly rare or expensive, and it would never make sense to go mine for them in space. (The short-lived supply crunch that brought them into public eye was caused by the Chinese first effectively subsidizing supply to the point where all other suppliers had to close, and then restricting exports. Since mines take several years to spin up, this caused some disruption until production in the rest of the world caught up. Supplies of REE are found practically everywhere.) I know that you didn't actually mean rare earths, you just meant rare metals in general. However, calling them rare earths is approximately as wrong as calling C# C or calling Javascript Java. It's really grating.