The BBC reports that the world’s richest men are scheming together not, as the comics would have you believe, to take over the world, but to extract minerals from asteroids. Highlights include:

• The billionaires plan to use robotic spacecraft to mine gold and other precious metals.
• The spacecraft would be self-fuelling. They would convert resources on the asteroid into fuel.
• The founders of Google and James Cameron, the director of Avatar and Titanic, are just two of the people funding the initiative.
• Scientists are skeptical. They note that while gold is £35 per gram, it costs NASA $1 billion to return 60g of matter from an asteroid.
• The first step is to launch space telescopes to find suitable mineral rich targets for mineral extraction.

Centives’ guess? It’s all a cover for the billionaires to find a way to control the trajectory of comets and then hold the world hostage. Although it does lead to the question…what on Earth (heh) could the billionaires possibly demand?

To read more about why this is not a charity, the space-structure that they aim to establish in the next ten years, the identity of other people backing the project, and what the backers and the skeptics have to say about it, click here.

Source: BBC