TLDR: Our solar system holds a near-infinite supply of energy, metals, fuel, and real estate. It’s hard to fathom the degree of wealth that exists beyond the bounds of Earth. A single metal asteroid (e.g., 16 Psyche) carries an estimated $10,000 quadrillion in metals. Carbonaceous asteroids hold the water that becomes hydrogen and oxygen (i.e. rocket fuel), the “oil of space.” Unlimited near-Earth sunlight is about to power a new industry: space-based AI compute, scaling from hundreds of gigawatts to terawatts once we build manufacturing on the lunar surface. The Moon and the asteroids are racing to become humanity’s first off-world mines. Five hundred years ago a handful of ships crossed an ocean and unlocked a “New World” that rewired the global economy. We’re standing at that same edge again. Except this time the ocean is space, and the New World has no shoreline.
Everything we value on Earth (energy, metals, minerals, real estate) is in near-infinite quantities in space. I’ve been saying for over a decade that the first trillionaires will be on the space frontier (in fact, one has already reached that threshold). This is not mere optimism for its own sake. It’s arithmetic.
“Abundance is our future. Scarcity is our past.”
— Peter
Let me show you the numbers behind that claim.
THE OCEAN WE ALREADY CROSSED
In 1492, Columbus crossed the Atlantic with three ships and a bad map. What followed was more than an exploration. It was the largest expansion of accessible resources in human history. New land, new metals, new crops, new trade routes. The flow of New World gold and silver into Europe is estimated to have moved hundreds of billions of dollars in today’s money, and it restructured the entire global economy.
The map is about to get bigger than any explorer in history could have imagined. And this time, there’s no edge to fall off.
Now here’s the part most people miss. The New World wasn’t more valuable than Europe because of any single mine. It was more valuable because it multiplied the surface area of human possibility. The map got bigger.
Space does the same thing, except the multiplier isn’t 2x or 10x, its one-million-fold bigger... it’s effectively unbounded.
METALS: A SINGLE ASTEROID WORTH MORE THAN THE GLOBAL ECONOMY
Start with the headline number. As mentioned above, a single asteroid named 16 Psyche, a metal-rich body about 140 miles across, has been valued at roughly $10 quintillion in metals. That’s a 10 followed by 18 zeros. For scale, the entire global economy is somewhere around $100 trillion. Psyche is on the order of 100,000 times larger than everything humanity produces in a year. Clearly such a quantity of metals would crater the metals market, but it would also increase the use of these materials (Jevon’s paradox).
Sources: NASA / Newsweek (16 Psyche ~$10 quintillion); Goldman Sachs (single-asteroid platinum ~$50B); World Bank (global GDP ~$100T); World Gold Council (above-ground gold stock). Log scale.
Psyche is a nickel-iron asteroid, the exposed core of what may have been a baby planet. The reason it matters isn’t the iron. It’s what rides along with it: platinum-group metals.
Platinum today trades north of $1,800 an ounce. These metals are the catalytic backbone of hydrogen fuel cells, electronics, and clean energy hardware, and on Earth they’re brutally rare. On a metallic asteroid, they can be concentrated at levels that would make any terrestrial mine look like a sandbox.
FUEL: THE OIL OF DEEP SPACE
What’s more valuable than platinum-group metals (that are primarily used on Earth)? Rocket fuel, derived in space, for use in space, specifically water-ice mined from Carbonaceous chondrite asteroids. Run an electric current through that water and it splits into hydrogen and oxygen. Hydrogen and oxygen are rocket propellant. They’re also breathable air and drinkable water.
So, why does that matter so much? Because the single most expensive thing in spaceflight is hauling fuel up out of Earth’s gravity well. Every gram of rocket fuel used in space since 1957 has been lifted out of Earth’s gravity well. Lifting a kilogram of anything to orbit has historically cost on the order of tens of thousands of dollars. If you can refuel in space, from water mined off an asteroid, you’ve just removed the biggest tax on every mission to the Moon, Mars, and beyond.
Water is the oil of the deep-space economy. The first company to set up Earth and Moon orbiting refueling stations will own the most valuable service facilities humans have ever staked. Not because the water is rare. Because it sits at the chokepoint of everything else.
ORBITAL ENERGY & DYSON SWARMS
Early in my space-career (way back in the 1980’s), when I was envisioning future value creation in orbit, I imagined tourism or in-space manufacturing. I never imagined space-based AI satellites (humanity’s Dyson Swarm).
As Eric Schmidt has noted, the limiting factor for AI on Earth today isn’t chips or talent… it’s power. The grid is maxing out. In orbit, that constraint simply disappears.
Back in 1964, the Russian astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev proposed ranking cosmic civilizations not by their morality or technology but by the energy they can harness. A Type I civilization captures all the energy available on its home planet, roughly 10^16 watts (for Earth). A Type II commands the full output of its star, on the order of 10^26 watts (for Sol), by wrapping a collection shell around the star, a Dyson sphere. That’s not a 10x jump over a planet. It’s a ten-billion-fold jump. The sun pours out more energy in one second than humanity has used in its entire history.
And what will we eventually do with 10^26 watts of energy? Power increasingly advanced AI systems.
COMPUTE: WHEN THE DATA CENTER MOVES TO SPACE
Here’s where the energy story turns into the most valuable industry of the century. If sunlight is free and unlimited in orbit, then the thing you most want to put up there is computation. AI compute is basically electricity converted into intelligence. Move the power source to space and you move the data center with it.
In the near-term, we’re not build a sphere around the Sun, but we are likely to launch hundreds of thousands of AI-data-center satellites into sun-synchronous orbits around the Earth.
Elon has laid out the math in two stages, and the numbers are worth sitting with.
Elon’s near-term prediction (by 2030): A few hundred gigawatts per year of AI compute launched into space. Starship, he says, could deliver around 100 gigawatts per year to high Earth orbit within four to five years, scaling launch mass from about 2,500 tons a year today, to a million tons a year within by 2030. For scale, a single gigawatt is about the output of a large nuclear reactor, and the entire U.S. has on the order of a few hundred gigawatts of AI-capable power today. He’s talking about adding that much new compute capacity every year, from orbit, with no grid to fight and no cooling bill.
Elon’s longer-term prediction (2040’s): Where next? Moving from 100 GW to 100 terawatt scale, built on lunar mining. In Elon’s words, “100 TW per year is possible from a lunar base producing solar-powered AI satellites locally, and accelerating them to escape velocity with a mass driver.” A terawatt is a thousand gigawatts. A hundred terawatts per year is on the order of the entire current power output of human civilization, added annually, in space.
Sources: Elon Musk (Dwarkesh Podcast, Feb 2026; SpaceX statements 2026) for ~100 GW/yr Starship-to-orbit, few-hundred-GW/yr near-term, and 100 TW/yr lunar-built long-term; US AI-capable power ~50 GW order-of-magnitude. Log scale.
Jeff Bezos said it plainly: “It’s 10 plus years, but I bet it’s not more than 20 years. We’re going to start building these giant gigawatt data centers in space. We will be able to beat the cost of terrestrial data centers in space in the next couple of decades.” Eric Schmidt bought the launch company Relativity Space to chase the same vision. Starcloud already flew the first NVIDIA GPU to orbit as a proof of concept, and Crusoe plans to stand up the first public cloud in space. When three of the wealthiest technologists on Earth independently bet on the same “impossible” idea, pay attention.
The sun pours out more energy in a single second than humanity has used in its entire history. We’re finally building the bucket.
REAL ESTATE: A FRONTIER WITH NO SHORELINE
When European settlers reached the Americas, the most enduring wealth turned out not to be the gold they shipped home. It was the land they settled (and/or took from the native populations). Every acre eventually became a farm, a city, a market.
Now apply that to space. The asteroid belt alone contains over a million asteroids larger than a kilometer. The Moon has 14.6 million square miles of surface, almost the area of Asia, sitting three days away. There is no Atlantic to cross, no edge of the map, no fixed quantity of “land” to fight over. The frontier keeps expanding the moment you reach it.
Jeff Bezos takes this to its logical conclusion. With the resources and solar power of the solar system, he argues, “We could have a trillion people out in the solar system,” and “if we had a trillion humans, we would have a thousand Einsteins and a thousand Mozarts, and unlimited, for all practical purposes, resources and solar power.” That’s the part that moves me most. Abundance doesn’t only mean more metal and more energy. It’s also more intelligence, both human minds and AIs. More intelligence that is free to invent, create, and solve. The ceiling on genius has always been the size of the human population and the technical resources to support it. Space lifts both. Scarcity is a story we tell because Earth has edges. The solar system doesn’t.
“When you have an Abundance Mindset, rather than slicing the pie into thinner and thinner slices, you bake more pies.”
— Peter
This is the part that disrupts people’s intuitions. Every economic model we’ve ever built assumes finite resources and zero-sum competition. That assumption was always temporary. It was true only for as long as our reach ended at the atmosphere.
THE MOON VERSUS THE ASTEROIDS
So where do we mine first? This is the real strategic debate, and there are good arguments on both sides.
The Moon is close. Three days away, with water ice locked in its permanently shadowed polar craters and helium-3 scattered across its regolith. Proximity is the Moon’s superpower. Lower launch costs, faster round trips, a natural staging base for everything deeper. The case against it: extraction is hard in one-sixth gravity, and the richest dreams (large-scale helium-3 for fusion) depend on fusion reactors we don’t yet have.
The asteroids are richer and more varied, unincumbered by a significant gravity well. Metallic asteroids concentrate platinum and nickel-iron at grades no planet’s crust can match, and carbonaceous ones hand you fuel and water. The case against: they’re far, they’re scattered, and a mission is a multi-year commitment.
My honest take, after fifteen years of thinking about this: it’s actually not either-or. The Moon is the training ground and the gas station. The asteroids are the motherlode. We learn to mine on the Moon because it’s close, then we apply what we learn to the asteroid belt because that’s where the real wealth lives.
Even some longtime lunar advocates now admit the return on asteroids may beat the return on the Moon.
THE LUNAR ECONOMY: OUR FIRST OFF-WORLD ADDRESS
Everything I’ve described needs a beachhead, and the Moon is it. Three days away, it’s close enough to be our practice field, our fuel depot, and our first factory floor off Earth. This is no longer a thought experiment. NASA’s Artemis program, China’s lunar plans, and a swarm of private landers are all converging on the same gray dirt this decade.
The bankers have started doing the math. PwC projects a lunar economy worth roughly $170 billion a year by 2040, built on three pillars: government exploration contracts, lunar surface operations, and the mobility and logistics to move between them. That’s before the truly large prize, which is using lunar water ice for propellant and lunar metal for manufacturing, so we stop shipping everything up from Earth.
Sources: PwC Lunar Market Assessment (~$170B by 2040); SpaceNexus cislunar segment estimates; 2050 figure reflects illustrative continued build-out. Log scale.
Here’s the strategic insight that gets overlooked. The Moon’s real value isn’t what we ship back to Earth. It’s what we never have to ship up from Earth again. Once you can make rocket fuel, structural metal, and solar panels on the lunar surface, the Moon becomes the assembly line for everything deeper in the solar system.
Remember Elon’s terawatt vision: solar-powered AI satellites manufactured on the Moon and flung into deep space by an electromagnetic mass driver, no rockets required. The lunar economy and the orbital-compute economy are the same story told from two ends.
WHAT THIS MEANS FOR YOU
If you’re an entrepreneur: The picks-and-shovels opportunities here are wide open. Refueling depots, extraction robotics, ISRU processing, orbital logistics. You don’t have to own an asteroid to get rich serving the people who do.
If you’re an executive: Start tracking the cost-per-kilogram-to-orbit curve the way you track Moore’s Law. When it crosses certain thresholds, entire industries (metals, energy, manufacturing) get a new and effectively unlimited supply chain.
If you’re an investor: There will be many first trillion-dollar fortunes made in space. Fuel and logistics before glamour.
If you’re a student: This is the field of your lifetime. Planetary science, robotics, materials, space law. The people who write the rules and build the tools for the off-world economy are in school right now.
If you’re a parent: Teach your kids that the future is not a fixed pie to be divided. It’s an expanding frontier to be built. The mindset of abundance is the most valuable thing you can hand them.
FIFTY YEARS, ONE MAP
Put it all on a single timeline and the shape of the century comes into focus. Satellites and launch are the mature core today. Space tourism is the luxury edge already selling seats. Orbital AI data centers begin this decade and become the largest line on the chart. Lunar infrastructure matures through the 2030s and 40s. Asteroid mining, the business I bet on too early, finally arrives once the fuel depots and lunar factories make it cheap to reach the belt.
Illustrative build-out. Near-term anchors: McKinsey/WEF total space economy ~$1.8T by 2035 (from $630B in 2023); Morgan Stanley >$1T by 2040; PwC lunar ~$170B by 2040; space mining ~$40B and space tourism ~$10–90B by 2035. Figures beyond ~2040 are directional extrapolations, not forecasts.
McKinsey and the World Economic Forum already peg the total space economy at $1.8 trillion by 2035, nearly triple its 2023 size. And that estimate barely accounts for the orbital-compute and asteroid-mining curves that bend skyward in the decades after. The trillion-dollar sky isn’t one industry. It’s a stack of them, each one unlocking the next.
On June 12, 2026, SpaceX went public in the largest IPO in history and Elon became the world’s first trillionaire. In his remarks, he repeated the line he’s been saying for 24 years: the goal is to “take the fiction out of science fiction.” That’s exactly what’s happening to everything in this newsletter. My early predictions came true… The first trillionaire was made in space. He just won’t be the last.
“The best way to predict the future is to create it yourself.”
— Peter
The only question that matters is whether you still believe scarcity is permanent. Look up, and ask yourself how much of that sky you’re willing to call impossible.
To a future of Abundance,
Peter
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Absolutely astonishing and invigorating read Peter 🔥 My daughter is in tech school in the AirForce cyber systems - once commissioned as an officer SpaceForce will pull her over - This is the most exciting time to be a parent !
Peter — I've followed Metatrends for years, and this one I'll be quoting. "Water is the oil of the deep-space economy" is exactly right, and I think it's a bigger key than even you let on.
Because the same water-as-fuel logic that refuels us in orbit is also the way off the one externality the abundance story keeps quiet: the stratospheric cost of burning our way up on chemical rockets. Electrolyze water and the propellant that frees the solar system is also the propellant that doesn't soot the sky to reach it.
That's not a brake on abundance — it's the next Moonshot. Clean-to-orbit, taken as seriously as asteroid mining. I've been charting one version of it (a water-propellant vehicle I call the Kettle), and we've put the rocket-externality question through a full adversarial public hearing — strongest case for, strongest case against, a finding on the record: https://intelligencecommons.ca/hearing-2-finding/
You and your co-hosts have the reach to make alternatives to chemical launch a real subject instead of a footnote. So here's the question I keep coming back to: who's going to make clean launch the Moonshot? Now that we know — what will we do?