Anything organic like would be more efficient to synthesize after it’s discovery. If the writers said it can’t be synthesized, it would just be the writers pushing a false dichotomy. Very few things can’t be synthesized and the things that can’t, are harvested responsibly, like horseshoe crab blood.
But then it’s not natural! If I’m a future space billionaire, of course I’d want the real stuff with animal suffering involved, duh.
Normally, I’m against fraud, but if I could make a businesses of selling fake Rhino Horn Dick medicine to showoff millionaires, I would.
Just fill some mason jars with some sort of powder (maybe plaster?) put a picture of a rhino on it and sell each one for $500.
Edit: Maybe small vials full of ground-up fingernail would be more “realistic”?
I was joking, but there’s already counterfeit rhino horns being put out by conservationists.
The problem with sci-fi is that it comes with its own solutions. A responsible society would engineer a brainless whale it could grown in tanks back home.
The problem comes when the usual culprits of capitalism (e.g. top-down management, the unyielding greed of shareholders for quick profits, decisions made based on limited information and no ingenuity) stop us from invoking a working solution.
Competition between companies is supposed to fuel innovation and non-evil production, but mostly it promotes anti-competitive practices.
