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  • This video is done in a collaboration with Skillshare.

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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.

This video is done in a collaboration with Skillshare.

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