A steel factory represents real wealth, because you can use it to make parts for cars, buildings and so on. NASA bombshell: Hubble Space Telescope makes shock new discovery, NASA Moon landing warning: Humans at risk from crippling illness, Intern Brenton Chase's impression of Psyche 16, NASA engineers celebrate after a successful landing on Mars, UFO sighting: ‘Alien craft’ spotted during NASA Apollo 12 moon walk, UFO sighting: NASA films ‘largest UFO ever recorded’ exiting Sun, A NASA press conference after spacecraft Juno successfully begins orbit around Jupiter, Saturn hiding life? A house does too, because you can live in it or rent it out. That means if we carried it back to Earth, it would destroy commodity prices and cause the world's economy – worth £59.5trillion – to collapse. Psyche 16, discovered in 1852 by Italian astronomer Annibale de Gasparis, is nestled in between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Rejoice, people of Earth! And because a golden asteroid wouldn’t increase the world’s total demand for gold, there’s no way it could create quadrillions of dollars of new real wealth. But in fact, there’s a more fundamental reason why a giant golden asteroid wouldn’t make the world fabulously rich. Planetary Resources was formed in 2012 and received investment from Google’s Larry Page and Eric Schmidt. Deep Space Industries and Planetary Resources each have their eyes on the 2011 UW158 asteroid which is twice the size of the Tower of London and worth up to £4.5trillion. The Sun reports that the gold, platinum, iron and nickel on Psyche 16 are worth £8,000 quadrillion (£8,000,000,000,000,000,000). But De Beers needed more than that in order to prevent diamonds from eventually becoming commoditized -- and so it turned to marketing, launching one of the most effective advertising campaigns ever with the slogan, "A Diamond Is Forever." Have a confidential tip for our reporters? "But the four to five million ounces of gold they bring to the market every year pales in comparison to the conquests available in space.". We've known about Psyche for a while, but its potential to wreak havoc on Earth's economy was recently touched upon by a veteran miner. Home of the Daily and Sunday Express. Instead, the Psyche probe will be loaded with equipment to examine the probe's composition. What do you think Nasa will find on Psyche? "The asteroid is considered unique, as it appears to largely be made of the exposed nickel-iron core of an early planet – one of the building blocks of our solar system.". order back issues and use the historic Daily Express Its average diameter is about 140 miles (226 kilometers) — about one-sixteenth the diameter of Earth’s Moon or about the distance between Los Angeles and San Diego. Fortunately, the space agency is taking the trip for scientific purposes and isn't planning on conducting any mining. Owners of a golden asteroid could conceivably try to pull a similar trick, launching advertising campaigns to get people to start using gold for more things -- building materials, perhaps, or clothing. Scott Moore, who heads up EuroSun Mining, said the sheer amount of gold in the asteroid threatens to throw the gold industry into chaos. CDC’s Virus Messaging Is Too Complicated to Trust, Bed Bath & Beyond Is on the Verge of an Epic Comeback, You Can Oppose Trump While Supporting Reopening Schools, How the Office Will Change When Everyone’s Back, Democrats Are Too Affluent to Be Socialists, Armenia-Azerbaijan Conflict Is Russia’s Problem to Solve. Psyche, which is 120 miles wide, is loaded with heaps of platinum, iron and nikel. Express. The metal would have various industrial applications and make nice jewelry and dental fillings, but it wouldn’t spark a new industrial revolution, or dramatically bring down the cost of goods and services, or in general make human life much better or more comfortable. Scott Moore, chief of EuroSun Mining has spoken about the potentially cataclysmic effects of extracting these elements. If you want to get rich, don’t think about how to seize scarce resources.