Asteroid filled with gold could make everyone on earth a bloody billionaire

If you haven’t realised that we’re already living in a beautifully dystopian science-fiction future by now, you really haven’t been paying attention. We’ve got bloody moguls running the free world, technology governing our lives and scientific researchers and organisations planning – and in some cases completing – unprecedented projects. Today, we’re gonna have a bloody squiz at NASA’s plan to ‘capture’ an asteroid so they can take a look inside.

Right, first of all, there’s a couple of interesting parts to this.

The first is the plan itself.

The second is the potential riches on offer inside the asteroid.

Credit: NASA

We’ll approach each in turn. We reckon that’ll make bloody good sense.

So, first of all, the asteroid: Known as 16 Psyche, because if you are gonna do space opera stuff, you may as well name things names that wouldn’t go astray in The Expanse series. 

Credit: Slashgear

According to NASA, “Deep within rocky, terrestrial planets – including Earth – scientists infer the presence of metallic cores, but these lie unreachable below planets’ rocky mantles and crusts. Because scientists cannot see or measure Earth’s core directly, Psyche offers a unique window into the violent history of collisions and accretion that created terrestrial planets.”

So, what they want to do is see inside the Asteroid to determine what the insides of Earth might look like. To do that, they’ll launch a craft in early 2022 and use their high-tech wizardry to study the rock.

Now, the potential riches: It’s known that 16 Psyche contains a metric arse-load of iron and nickel. In fact, it’s been projected that the value of that is $10,000 Quadrillion. That’s actually more money than there is in the world right now. Or so we’re told. (Apparently, there’s like $75 trillion US in existence.)

Just in case you can’t tell, we’re hardly mathematicians, but that’s bloody heaps of cash. Of course, with big rich investors like Mitch Hunter-Scullion saying, “Once you set up the infrastructure then the possibilities are almost infinite. There’s an astronomical amount of money to be made by those bold enough to rise to the challenge of the asteroid rush,” you don’t have to be a mathematician to know that money would never flow back to the places its needed most.

Credit: ASU/NASA Psyche Mission

Final thought: Obviously, this is a pretty bold move. What we’d love to see is NASA doing their research and then blowing it all up. After all, it’s not like the moguls already running the show are going to miss the extra cash. We feel like that’d be a pretty bloody good move. Unless of course, anyone’s got a secret spaceship they haven’t told anyone about. Perhaps we could get there first and claim it for ourselves.

Just in case you missed it, here’s one of Ozzy’s latest commentary videos…Ozzy Man Reviews: Russian Sport

Video Link: TED-Ed