Chapter 6, titled "Mining the Sky: Post-Scarcity in Resources," is the third chapter under Part II, "New Travellers," a section dedicated to examining how advances in automation, energy, resources, health, and food are creating the foundation for a society that moves "beyond both scarcity and work". This chapter introduces the crucial argument that alongside climate change, resource depletion represents one of the central challenges of the age, particularly noting that the minerals required for sustaining a post-carbon world are ultimately finite. Although Chapter 5 addressed the potential for limitless power from solar energy, the transition would still be constrained by materials like lithium and cobalt, which are necessary for energy storage. If a complete global transition to renewables were to occur, such resources would quickly become strained, requiring constant recycling, a situation that would ultimately ensure that post-capitalism would remain confined to conditions of "abiding scarcity".

The solution presented in this chapter is the radical proposal to overcome the limitations of a finite world by choosing to "mine the sky instead". The sources detail the immense and almost incomprehensible wealth available in space, particularly among near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) [130–1]. For instance, the asteroid 16 Psyche, located in the belt between Mars and Jupiter, is composed of iron, nickel, and rarer elements, with its total estimated "value" reaching around $10,000 quadrillion—just for the iron content. The chapter notes the emergence of the private space industry, with companies like SpaceX pushing down costs of launch, and new techniques such as 3-D printing making rockets cheaper and quicker to manufacture. Should humanity succeed in accessing this resource abundance, it would not only address issues of mineral depletion on Earth but potentially collapse the price of these valuable commodities altogether, creating extreme supply in raw materials.