One NASA report estimates that the mineral wealth of the asteroids in the asteroid belt might exceed more than $100 billion for each of the six billion people (at the time) on Earth.
Doing the math, that comes out to $600,000,000,000,000,000,000 worth of minerals in the belt!
An asteroid with a diameter of one kilometer would have a mass of about two billion tons. There are perhaps one million asteroids of this size in the solar system.
One of these asteroids, according to John S. Lewis, author of the space mining book Mining the Sky, would contain 30 million tons of nickel, 1.5 million tons of metal cobalt and 7,500 tons of platinum. The platinum alone would have a value of more than $150 billion.
For now the price of mining an asteroid would simply be too high to be worth it, but who knows what could happen in the future! There's a lot of wealth just floating out there in space.
