How to Become Humanity's First Trillionaire - YouTube

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The wealthiest person in the world has a new face. And his name is Jeff Bezos.

With a current net worth of 123.6 Billion dollars that is increasing all the time,

he's on track to becoming the wealthiest person in modern human history.

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.

And by whoever gets heavily involved in this industry first.

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:

"The first trillionaire will ever be is the person who mines asteroids for their natural resources. I'm just saying."

To get a little more detail about why this will be the case, we need to understand why certain asteroids are valuable.

Take the asteroid belt, for example, located between Mars and Jupiter.

There are millions of asteroids located here that are together estimated to be worth over 700 Quintilian dollars.

That's because several asteroids here contain enormous amounts of raw materials that are very rare back on Earth's surface.

Like gold, silver, palladium, and perhaps most interestingly platinum.

A company called "Planetary Resources" estimated in 2012 that the platinum mined from a small 30 meter wide asteroid,

could be worth somewhere between 25 and 50 Billion dollars at current market value.

Just one Platinum rich asteroid could contain more Platinum than humanity has ever mined in history.

Which, if introduced all at once, would almost certainly crash the economic value of platinum.

This would, however, greatly reduce the cost of nearly all electronic devices that we use.

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.

But it's not just platinum that future space miners will be after.

A large asteroid with a diameter of 1 kilometer could contain two to three times the global production of Iron Nickel Ore.

And the very large asteroid, 16 Psyche, could satisfy the entire global demand for nickel iron for several million years.

Asteroids like these have the potential to give humanity a near infinite supply of these incredibly valuable raw materials.

And the corporations that are providing these infinite supplies will reap the tremendous financial returns.

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.

Nearly 15,000 Near-Earth asteroids, or NEA'S, have been discovered with close orbits to Earth so far.

Of these, the most valuable one identified so far is likely 162173 Ryugu.

Nearly one kilometer wide and estimated to be worth nearly 83 billion dollars.

This one asteroid is worth about the same as the entire Starbucks corporation is.

And the Japanese government is sending a probe there that will return a valuable sample to Earth in December 2020.

That's because the next time the asteroid will be closest to Earth will be on December 29th 2020.

And then again on June 3rd 2025.

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.

And if successful, it could be stepping stone out to the far more valuable asteroids out in the asteroid belt.

Where there have already been 711 asteroids discovered estimated to be worth over 100 trillion dollars each!

Making each one equal to about the entire global GDP in 2014.