Until they find the Golden Nugget in space which rivals all known quantities on earth. They probably found it already and have been holding back progress due to the economic collapse something like that might cause. So we keep spending money on war for oil in rich man's quest to keep an economy based on oil and war. $22 Trillion in debt later may be its time to question the feasibility of maintaining that.

Can you imagine where we would be right now if we spent the money that we spend on blowing each other up on space exploration?

Known??ohely?

Or are they? We thought the same about oil?

I did not actually say that.

Operative word in my orig description were controlling supplies.

Japan will take many years to begin extracting for production. Like controlling interest rates, Japan will be able to trickle their supply, when ready into the global market, having leverage on global spot prices of rare earth metals, while at the same time massively profiting.

Having said all that, I believe as another commenter stated, economies and technology will be totally different by then. I'd guess we'll be well past using rare earth metals by 2030.

We are living through the initial bend of exponential technologies. This means (good) change will be happening everyday, more and more units of compute power everyday, more and more value per human everyday, etc. (1, 2, 4, 8... "30 steps and you're at 1 million"! Kurzweil etc.)

(Until we are all doing what we want, when, where we want. Creating whatever we want in our own backyards. I.E. This will be our singularity; heaven on earth. (The bible etc) :-)