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David Callaway Archives | Email alerts
April 26, 2012, 12:01 a.m. EDT
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By David Callaway, MarketWatch
RINGS OF SATURN (MarketWatch) "” Stardate, 75818.5 (April 26, 2022).
I'm sitting in an intergalactic "gas station" with Google's Larry Page and Eric Schmidt on the warmer side of the Rings of Saturn, refueling with water on our way to the Kuiper Asteroid Belt beyond Neptune. Lottery tickets and beer are on sale behind the cash register.
The shutdown of global debt markets following last month's U.S. default has given me precious time off from MarketWatch to travel with a couple of the main backers of Seattle's Planetary Resources Inc., on one of its now-regular voyages to mine platinum and water from the solar system's thousands of asteroids.
On June 5 and 6, 2012, one of the rarest astronomical events will occur: the Venus transit. This animation released by NASA shows an artist's conception of the event.
The chief executive and chairman of Google Inc. /quotes/zigman/93888/quotes/nls/goog GOOG +1.11% have agreed to take me and a photographer from The Daily Beast on their latest voyage to prove to a skeptical media that the future of earth's resources does indeed lie in space. They are dressed casually and maneuver with determined weightlessness.
"We told everybody back at the IPO in 2004 that our ultimate mission was "?don't do evil' and that we hoped to use the company to benefit mankind," Page said. "Now that we've mapped the world and captured every part of it on live video, it's time to conquer space. And with our stock at $72,400, post three splits, our shareholders haven't done so bad either."
Indeed, it seemed like an April Fool's joke in the middle of that month in 2012 when the search engine giant's two executives announced plans with Planetary Resources to mine the asteroids of the universe.
Seemed like just the latest in a series of bizarre ventures Google embarked on to spend its fortunes, such as floating wind farms and creating a national Wi-Fi platform. Everything but its core competency, which was as a search engine.
But hey, we laughed when Google bought YouTube also, and when it took over a struggling Apple Inc. in 2016, and merged its beleaguered iPhone and iPad products into its industry-standard Android system.
Like many Silicon Valley pioneers before them, Page and Schmidt dreamed of changing the world. But this time by leaving it. With the natural gas-fracking craze having left the many parts of the world uninhabitable because of constant earthquakes, with oil running out fast, and the solar industry bankrupted by years of misinformation and venture capital neglect, there was only one alternative, they believed.
An aggressive asteroid-blasting strategy was put in place, an intergalactic fracking initiative that would use lasers to blast valuable platinum, and even more important, water, out of the hearts of the wayward rocks.
Space environmentalists were frozen out of the privately-financed plans, an action justified by the need for more resources to keep the earth alive. The science fiction-age fear of alien invasion of earth for similar reasons was replaced by an imperialistic frenzy, led by the trillionaires of the West Coast technology industry. And what true aliens did exist lived in fear of the rallying cry of "do no evil" that preceded the lasers.
Just as former President John F. Kennedy had once succeeded in his prediction of a man on the moon within a decade, Planetary Resources had hit its similar prediction made 10 years ago in 2012.
The introduction of large quantities of platinum, abundant in asteroids, caused chaos in commodities markets, but also led to the first commercially-available flying cars. More important, water fueled the exploration to the next frontier, in this case the Kuiper Belt beyond the galaxy's largest asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
Competition was building fast, and Page and Schmidt frequently looked over their shoulders at the filling station to make sure nobody had snuck up behind us on the way to Neptune.
Suddenly, with a great blue whoosh, a massive starship appeared above our explorer, hovered momentarily and then took off at warp speed. We could only glimpse the image on the tail of the ship but it was enough, a quarter-mile-high human face locked in a hideous laugh.
"Bezos," the Google executives shouted in fury. "He's beaten us to the punch. Fire the rockets and let's hurry."
But it would be in vain. By the time we got to Neptune there was already a five-star hotel in permanent orbit, the Jeff Bezos insignia on each of its 100 wings. And reservations through Amazon Inc. required in advance.
David Callaway is editor-in-chief of MarketWatch.
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David Callaway is editor-in-chief of MarketWatch, responsible for the global news coverage of 100 journalists in 12 bureaus in the U.S., Europe and Asia. A... Expand
David Callaway is editor-in-chief of MarketWatch, responsible for the global news coverage of 100 journalists in 12 bureaus in the U.S., Europe and Asia. A financial journalist for more than 20 years, Callaway has worked for Bloomberg News, the Boston Herald, and assorted television and cable stations as a reporter, columnist and commentator. Collapse
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