Well rare earth elements are heavy metals, and so it's about their atoms that is important. It's not something you can make via chemical processes, you'd need

Well rare earth elements are heavy metals, and so it's about their atoms that is important. It's not something you can make via chemical processes, you'd need some kind of nuclear process, like how new atoms are made (kind of like how scientists make synthetic elements with more than 92 protons). Either that or split a heavier larger atom into the metals you want, although this means it would in either case be unstable. The amount of energy to do these is so incomparably huge to just digging them out of the ground.