Within the circles of intellectualism of the contemporary Spur, there has been an organized attempt to first find and then justify a specific date for the start of the “Phoron Scarcity.” However, in reality, the phoron scarcity was a crisis years in the making, though all who should have known better ignored the obvious signs. Ever since phoron’s discovery in 2352, it slowly became an essential resource for the modern functioning of the Spur; for it is the only element known to be a Room Temperature Superconductor (RTC) without extensive chemical alteration. While phoronic compounds are also incredible in their own right, phoron’s primary utility comes from its status as the only RTC currently known to exist. It is this property that saw a rapid increase in demand, with incredibly limited supply even able to be mined, ensuring from the very beginning that the Romanavich Cloud would run dry. However, this was conveniently ignored by most of the academic world, heavily reliant on megacorporate funding. Those who went against this narrative were denounced by all of their academic peers as conspiracy theorists; though time would prove that they were in fact stating the uncomfortable truth. Not acknowledging this truth would cause perhaps the largest crisis since the Interstellar War; the ongoing Phoron Scarcity. This was not even their greatest mistake. Far larger was pinning a long period of sustained and massive economic and technological growth onto this limited resource, creating a massive, spurwide, bubble, and if it fully popped, it would bring everything down; thankfully, that hasn’t gotten close to happening yet, though the prelude to beginning itself was bad enough.