Mining asteroids will ultimately benefit humanity on and off the Earth in a multitude of ways.
As you may know, I'm the co-founder and co-chairman of an asteroid company called Planetary Resources that is backed by a group of eight billionaires to implement the bold mission of extracting resources from near-Earth asteroids.
What opened up the American West was the fact that you owned the real estate. You owned the gold mines, the oil wells. The creation of these, back then, million dollar industries drove the railroads and eventually the airlines to provide this kind of transportation.
You could not legally put a human and fly them into space. In fact, you couldn't bring a spaceship back. All those spaceships we were sending commercially into space were one way. You sort of like, got rid of them. And most passengers, who go up, do want to come back down.
The idea of a young thin woman who weighs 100 pounds driving herself around in a 4,000 pound SUV is laughable.
When cars have the sensory systems around them, GPS intelligence, they're looking at the world not only in visual spectrum, but infrared, ultraviolet and everything else that's going on and they've got reaction times in microseconds. Not a tenth of a second. They're a hundred thousand times faster.
We have these 100 mms delays, you know, our attention is on our PDA, we're always in a rush. We drive around in these 4,000 pound metal wombs, these 4,000 pound containment systems to protect us from these 6,000 pound cars from smacking us.
My goal is there's a new generation of cars. And people can say we're living in a new day and age. A new day and age of cars that are beautiful, affordable, safe, and of course every car gets over 100 mpg, why wouldn't it.
Life on Earth is at an ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by disaster. ... I think the human race doesn't have a future if it doesn't go into space. I therefore want to encourage public interest in space.
I have the general philosophy of creating the future you want to see.
The folks who go after grand challenges are impatient. They're pissed off. They're sick and tired, but in a passionate way. They're driven by a fire in their bellies to make a difference.
