Michio Kaku predicts asteroid mining will happen sooner than you think | Big Think

[Music] When I was researching my book, The Future of Humanity, I came across a comment made by Thomas Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson made the biggest, the biggest gamble of his life, buying the Louisiana Purchase from Napoleon. Napoleon was fighting the British; he needed cash immediately. He had Louisiana and that whole middle portion of the United States, and so Napoleon sold it to Thomas Jefferson for a song.

But how much ever since? Thought how long would it take to investigate what he had just purchased? He had doubled the size of the USA. Think about that! And he probably violated the Constitution in the process. Everyone forgets that; everyone glosses over that fact. But hey, when Lewis and Clark went into the torrid territories that comprised the Louisiana Purchase, they found tremendous prospects for wealth and prosperity.

But Thomas Jefferson wrote that it may take a thousand years, a thousand years, before they could then begin to settle the West. Well, how long did it take? A few decades. Because what happened? Gold! Gold was discovered in California, sparking the gold rush, and within just a few years, millions, millions of prospectors, settlers, fortune hunters converged on California. It didn't take a thousand years to develop that.

Then the question now is, is there going to be a new Gold Rush in outer space? Some people think so. Some Google billionaires have created an organization, a company, Planetary Resources, that are looking into prospecting in the asteroid belt. Now, asteroids come in all shapes and sizes, and we're cataloging them now. We have already found some prospective asteroids that could be mined.

One asteroid, perhaps maybe 30 to 50 feet across, brought back down either to the moon or to planet Earth, could in fact yield billions, billions of dollars in rewards because of the rare earths and the platinum-type metals that you find inside. You see, the electronics industry is dependent upon rare earths. Where are these rare earth elements found? Mainly in China. They're everywhere, of course, but China has the most developed market, and the Chinese in turn supply on the order of 90% of the rare earths.

Well, a few years ago, they decided to capitalize that and raise the price. All of a sudden, shockwaves, shockwaves spread around the Earth because people realized that, oh my God, China has a stranglehold, a stranglehold on high technology. How can you build the next iPhone if you don't have the rare earths to make the transistors and to make the delicate components of these high-tech devices?

So I think what's happening here is that some people see an area for profit, and that is asteroid mining. Now, of course, the infrastructure for that doesn't exist. But NASA has looked at its budget and does have a program that has been shelved temporarily to call— to redirect an asteroid. The asteroid redirect program is to send the SLS booster rocket into outer space with the Orion capsule. It will then intercept an asteroid and bring it back to orbit around the moon.

Then it could be mined as it orbits around the moon or as it's brought back to the planet Earth. And so this is now beyond the phase of science fiction. We're no longer talking about dreaming about an asteroid redirect; we're talking about an actual plan with the economics, with the details laid out.

However, at the present time, we have to wait for NASA's SLS rocket to mature to the point where we can intercept an asteroid. [Music...]