To be completely fair, there's literally nothing in the world even remotely as valuable as TN materials are in Aurora. The closest thing would MAYBE be something like uranium, or some other radioactives maybe, but TN materials are orders of magnitude more important. After all they are limited, they don't renew at ALL, and have NO possible substitute ever. Without them you are stuck on earth while waiting for the heat death of the Universe
Well, we know there is no substitute ever for them; they have no more evidence about it, then we (real ones) know it about iron and rare earth metals ores, hydrocarbons and phosphates: all those are non-renewable (in quantities) and we know no way to build or support civilization without those. Yet nearly all extraction industry of those remains commercial.
And that is... a bit of a gripe for me - the only way to feasibly acquire more of TN elements is to expand - more solar systems are generated, more TNEs to acquire... (salvaging civilian ship wrecks is... so odd, that I consider this as a too perverted way to acquire TN elements).
Even in our world, no element in the periodic table is truly non-renewable: you can bombard any element with sufficient energy to convert it into any other element, provided you have sufficient power to do so - our nuclear power plants pretty much opened this new capability... Of course, the amount acquired this way is quite low, it will hardly be enough to satisfy the full demand, but at least it is a way to get the rare elements if you are desperate enough.
And this got me thinking - say folks, what do you think of synthetic Trans-Newtonian element plants? These can be extremely expensive to operate in terms of wealth, cheaper if you convert existing TN element into other TN element, but... we do have some equivalents in our real world - there were synthetic oil plants and fuel substitutes in world war 2...