"God," he cries, dying on Mars, "God, we made it!" - Theodore Sturgeon

Create a world in which these things do or do not exist, or in which they are extended in some way. Test reality against this fiction. The reader will recognize the world that you're talking about, even though it may be another one altogether

Let me tell you something: you can not write good fiction about ideas. You can only write good fiction about people.

The alternative is to locate large deposits of specifically what we need, and extract it in bulk from the earth.”
“That’s mining,” said the Drip. “There is a twenty-third century legend that youth was conscripted to work in mines. Anyhow, all young people were known as miners at one period.