“Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its continuing mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before”, a quote from star trek, the TV series famous for its technological predictions that illustrates a possible future for mankind. From the beginning of man, billions of individuals have been staring up at the night sky, wondering what its purpose was and how it worked. The universe has been a mysterious place for thousands of years until more recently where the stars and planets were not being referred to as ‘gods’, but as large land masses and giant balls of gas all made up of millions of little …show more content…
Asteroids orbiting the inner belt have been found to hold tons of materials that are very valuable, which could help incite the process of space exploration. One asteroid in particular, 2011 UW158, was filled with 90 million tons of platinum, which recently passed by earth last July. (“Platinum Asteroid”, 2015). Some space mining corporations have already come into effect and are currently working on technologies that can help access a completely new field of work to be accessible to many. In turn, hundreds of years from now, space mining can lead to things outside of our own solar system, creating even more leaps and major discoveries for space exploration. Possibly thousands of years from now, people and corporations will be fighting over the ownership of planets. A man named Greg Laughlin has even divined an equation based off of the Louisiana Purchase to be able to calculate the cost of a planet by considering its habitability, their ease of being studied, and how much money spent looking for them. (Laughlin, 2015). Interestingly enough, solving for Earth would result in it being worth about 5 quadrillion dollars. There are many prospects of space exploration, but cannot happen without a great source of