Asteroid worth $10,000,000,000,000,000,000 could have shocking unintended consequences
An asteroid worth an insane $10 quintillion could have dramatic consequences if it's captured.
NASA has set its sights on what might be the most valuable object in the solar system, though their goals are said to be primarily scientific rather than commercial.
In 2023, the space agency launched its mission from Kennedy Space Center in Florida to retrieve the valuable asteroid named 16 Psyche.
Traveling at speeds of approximately 84,000 mph, the mission is headed for the asteroid located three times Earth's distance from the Sun, with arrival scheduled for August 2029.
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What makes this 16 Psyche so valuable?
Located in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, this metallic sphere is thought to be packed with precious materials including gold, platinum, iron, nickel, and cobalt. So, it's no wonder why NASA is keen to get its hands on it.
"Teams of engineers and technicians are working almost around the clock to ensure the orbiter is ready to journey 2.5 billion miles to a metal-rich asteroid that may tell us more about planetary cores and how planets form," the space agency said in July 2023.
NASA's current estimates suggest the asteroid consists of '30 to 60 percent metal,' with a surface area spanning approximately 64,000 square miles - roughly the size of South Carolina.
How much could 16 Psyche actually be worth?
According to projections reported by Newsweek, the asteroid's precious metal content could be worth approximately $10 quintillion - that's 100,000 larger than the world's $100 trillion global domestic product.
If this could somehow be evenly distributed among Earth's 8.062 billion inhabitants, every single person would walk away with around $1.2 billion.
So yeah, everyone would basically become a billionaire.
Though this might sound like the ultimate lottery win for most of us (perhaps less exciting for the likes of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos), some social media users aren't so optimistic about what the expensive rock would do to our economy.
One person commented on Reddit: "That's enough to make gold worthless."
While a second wrote: "And when everyone is a billionaire, no one is."
A third Reddit user pointed out: "All that gold would belong to who ever can mine it first. It just like saying there is quintillion dollars of oil on Earth. Is everyone rich? No. It belongs to whomever digs it up."
Money aside, though, scientists think 16 Psyche's metals came from the 'core of a planetesimal,' which could unlock secrets about how the cores of rocky planets like Earth developed billions of years ago.