I don't think you can call material sources renewable, well unless we talk wood, leather or whale fat I guess.

But in general metals can be recycled quite well and often are recycled due to their price. Also even if you finely shredded it and mixed it with other stuff the resulting mix would still most likely have higher grade than regular ore & mining it would thus be economicaly viable.

I’m not sure why you imagine that wartime wreckage and artillery is often recycled?

There's probably more metal in the solar system than the volume of Earth.

Ah yes, technical truth, the best kind of truth.

There could be asteroids of pure palladium, platinum, gold, and silver, and it wouldn't matter a fig until it was cost competitive with digging rocks out of the ground, sticking them on a slow barge to a massive refinery and processing them with cheap, probably exploitative, labor.

I guess this kind of retort would help you in a pub quiz.

There's no shortage of metal, that's the point. Open your mind.

There is an effective shortage of resources since the capacity to mine for them is not infinite, and production cannot meet demands.

And the metal in space doesn't help us with our current technology. Obviously.

"We can't have a metal shortage because there's lots of metal in space" is not the most coherent argument I've heard today...

What I originally said was there's no metal shortage, only the price of metal. We'll be mining the solar system long before we run out of metal on earth. For aluminum, for instance, there's an insane amount in the Earth's crust.

Supply and demand informs price. Not the other way around. That's why your argument makes no sense.