No, no… that’s what I’m saying. The importance of a thing is not completely… hmm… completely inherent in the thing itself. There’s a dormant potential, and there’s an outside activator — like fire hitting an accelerant. Take Arrakis.
Imagine you’re an ancient explorer. You find this speck of nothing floating in infinite nothing. It’s got breathable atmosphere, near ideal gravity, and the dominant life in the barren desert are these terrible worms. Back in the Old Empire, the only value of Arrakis was the various labs and testing stations experimenting on God knows what. They discover the spice mélange, that it keeps folk alive longer. A little interest is sparked.
But then… the Butlerian Jihad! Death to thinking machines. The accelerant! We discover the real secret of spice, that it grants the prescience needed to navigate fold-space tech. Ha! Then this speck of nothing floating in the infinite nothing soup suddenly becomes the one and only source for the most valuable commodity in all of human history.