Elon Musk might be working on making space travel a lot cheaper, but our dream of being intergalactic jet setters still won’t be financially feasible any time soon. Unless we accidentally get accepted into NASA’s astronaut program, those of us lacking comic-book-villain bank accounts can’t plan on zipping around the stars. What makes that even worse is that we’d easily be able to afford to go to space if we could just get to space, because it turns out space is worth a whole heck of a lot of money.
In the latest video from the great YouTube channel Life Noggin, they try to figure out the dollar value of space itself. Spoiler alert: it’s a lot. In fact, the moon itself is filthy rich.
Forget cheese: the moon is basically made out of dollar dollar bills.
When a single asteroid can contain metals worth trillions of dollars, the technical answer to this video’s question is “infinity”: space is worth infinity dollars.
But on a practical level, the one that might actually make traveling to space as feasible for a normal person as taking a commercial flight cross country, the resources available in space are the real value to mankind. Without having to commit money and space to getting necessities like water from Earth to space, mankind might be able to start leaving our home planet like walking to the corner store.
But creating the technology to do that won’t be cheap, so we’re still far away. That’s why the worse thing about all of this is knowing that our space money needs can easily be solved out in space. Space irony is the second worse thing.
What do you think space is worth? Your thoughts are worthy of our comments section below.
Images: Comedy Central, Fox
