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The wealthiest person in the world has a new face, and his name is Jeff Bezos.
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With a current net worth of one hundred twenty-three point six billion dollars that is increasing all the time, he's on track to becoming the wealthiest person in modern human history.
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His title of wealthiest person in the world, though, may be broken sometime in the future by an industry that hasn't even really started yet.
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And by whoever gets heavily involved in this industry first.
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The industry that I'm talking about is asteroid mining, which has been talked about extensively by people like Neil DeGrasse Tyson in video clips like this one:
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"The first trillionaire will ever be is the person who mines asteroids for their natural resources.
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I'm just saying."
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To get a little more detail about why this will be the case, we need to understand why certain asteroids are valuable.
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Take the asteroid belt, for example, located between Mars and Jupiter.
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There are millions of asteroids located here that are together estimated to be worth over seven hundred quintilion dollars.
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That's because several asteroids here contain enormous amounts of raw materials that are very rare back on Earth's surface.
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Like gold, silver, palladium, and perhaps most interestingly platinum.
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A company called "Planetary Resources" estimated in twenty twelve
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that the platinum mined from a small thirty meter wide asteroid could be worth somewhere between twenty-five and fifty billion dollars at current market value.
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Just one Platinum rich asteroid could contain more Platinum than humanity has ever mined in history.
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Which, if introduced all at once, would almost certainly crash the economic value of platinum.
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This would, however, greatly reduce the cost of nearly all electronic devices that we use.
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About one in four manufactured products on Earth use platinum group metals that are very expensive now but wouldn't necessarily be any more in this scenario.
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But it's not just platinum that future space miners will be after.
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A large asteroid with a diameter of one kilometer could contain two to three times the global production of Iron Nickel Ore.
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And the very large asteroid, sixteen Psyche, could satisfy the entire global demand for nickel iron for several million years.
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Asteroids like these have the potential to give humanity a near infinite supply of these incredibly valuable raw materials.
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And the corporations that are providing these infinite supplies will reap the tremendous financial returns.
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If you start one of these corporations you may not even have to go as far out as the asteroid belt to find one that's valuable enough.
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Nearly fifteen thousand Near-Earth asteroids, or NEA'S, have been discovered with close orbits to Earth so far.
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Of these, the most valuable one identified so far is likely one six two one seven three Ryugu.
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Nearly one kilometer wide and estimated to be worth nearly eighty-three billion dollars.
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This one asteroid is worth about the same as the entire Starbucks corporation is.
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And the Japanese government is sending a probe there that will return a valuable sample to Earth in December twenty twenty.
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That's because the next time the asteroid will be closest to Earth will be on December twenty-nineth twenty twenty.
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And then again on June third twenty twenty-five.
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Any company started by anybody between now and then that manages to get a mining operation set up on it could see profits of tens of billions of dollars.
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And if successful, it could be stepping stone out to the far more valuable asteroids out in the asteroid belt.
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Where there have already been seven hundred eleven asteroids discovered estimated to be worth over one hundred trillion dollars each!
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Making each one equal to about the entire global GDP in twenty fourteen.
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The problem is we're nowhere near capable of doing anything like this right now.
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Getting anything into space is expensive.
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This is being improved all the time, but even using the cheapest means right now,
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aboard the new Space X Falcon heavy rockets, still costs ninety million dollars per launch,
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or one thousand four hundred eleven dollars per kilogram of cargo outer low-earth orbit.
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This is dramatically cheaper than the cheapest option twenty years ago though,
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which was by launching the Zenit two rocket, for a price of three thousand two hundred and seventy-five dollars per kilogram of cargo into LEO,
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more than twice as expensive as the Falcon Heavy is today.
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Assuming that the price of getting things into space continues to decrease like this in the future, there's still the problem of how to actually mine metals on asteroids and bring them back to Earth in an efficient manner.
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One idea is to simply capture an asteroid with a space vehicle and tow it into a safe orbit above Earth.
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Once there, mining crews of humans and robots would take launches up and establish mining settlements looking for valuable material.
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And returning ships to Earth would bring those materials back down to be processed in factories and put into manufactured products.
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The idea of having a one-kilometre-wide asteroid orbiting so close to the Earth would be unnerving for a lot of people,
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but it's entirely legal for any U.S. citizen to do this right now, if they could.
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The US Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act signed into law in twenty fifteen
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"recognizes the right of US citizens to own space resources they obtain and encourages the commercial exploration and utilization of resources from asteroids."
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Interestingly, the law enables the ownership of resources taken from asteroids but not the ownership of any actual asteroid as property.
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That means that if a cooperation did tow an asteroid into orbit around Earth and set up a mining operation there,
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there wouldn't be any laws to prevent anybody else from flying up there and setting their own mining operation, too.
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This could become a messy situation that our descendants will probably have to deal with.
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As resources on Earth become increasingly scarce though, we'll inevitably one day start to take the almost limitless resources that can be found in asteroids and elsewhere in space more seriously.
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We could end the very concept of scarcity for some of these resources and the first person alive today that takes advantage of it will become our society's first trillionaire.
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It could even be one of you watching this video.