Asteroid mining should be heavily pursued

So you're saying that it won't cause inflation, but just render the price useless?

Once these metals are discovered in large quantities, then they would lose all their rarity based value. They might be valuable for other reasons though, such as being usable in building things, like steel.

There are a few ways, but like I said in the pretext, are based on theory.

1) Resources mined in space stay in space
2) Resources mined are directly and solely used for space related projects
3) For a while, the actual cost of the metals will not greatly exceed the cost of extracting the metals
4) https://economics.stackexchange.com/questions/32933/how-will-asteroid-mining-impact-the-economy

How would you solve the inflation problem that would rise with mining rare metals from asteroids? I doubt your opponent would respond.

True. Inflation would be a big problem. However there are ways to solve it, but unfortunately I would like to present those ways in the actual debate itself.

And yes, gold and platinum are the metals I'm most focused about, not iron or copper.

I think a lot of these precious metals would lose most of their value due to inflation. It happened with Spain when they mined the Americas for silver. If we mine asteroids, we should extract metals that would be extrinsically useful, meaning they can be used for things. Gold and platinum are only valuable because they are rare. Iron, Copper, and Aluminium on the other hand can be used but they are common on Earth. If they are common enough on Earth, we don't have to go to space to get them.

Actually Earth doesn't. Some asteroids are comprised of precious metals, and they can be worth trillions of trillions of dollars. And that's ONE asteroid! We have an entire asteroid belt!

Earth has more natural resources than asteroids do because earth is so huge by comparison. That doesn't mean we can access all the natural resources in the earth. When earth runs out of natural resources, then we can mine asteroids for things, but since earth is so big, I don't see that happening soon.

Most asteroids are worth billions if not trillions of dollars, and can be realistically mined within the nest few decades. <-- Main context

Also, asteroid basically provide an unlimited amount of precious metals. Earth will run out of precious metals in the future.

I think most resources we can get from asteroids can be obtained on Earth, without the cost to get there and to ship them to earth.