Platinum prices going to zero wouldn't destroy the economy, just platinum mines. The estimate I've seen for the total amount of gold humans have ever dug up is

Platinum prices going to zero wouldn't destroy the economy, just platinum mines. The estimate I've seen for the total amount of gold humans have ever dug up is an approximately 20m³ cube. Wiki says gold has a density of 19.283 g/cm³. If I'm doing my math right, that means we've dug up 154,264,000 kg of gold. If you value that at the current price of $85,000/kg, we've got $13 trillion of gold. Compare that with the guesses they were making about the "value" of a single metallic asteroid, 16 Psyche, of $10 quintillion[0]. Coming into contact with the New World let pre-industrial civilizations 2x or 3x the resources they could access, while the boost from asteroid mining could give us six or more orders of magnitude. That 20m³ could be collected and put in a museum. [0]: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/asteroid-16-psyche-may-be-worth-more-than-planet-earth-at-10-quintillion-in-fine-metals-180979303/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/asteroid-16-psyche...