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Mining asteroids will ultimately benefit humanity on and off the Earth in a multitude of ways.

As you may know, I'm the co-founder and co-chairman of an asteroid company called Planetary Resources that is backed by a group of eight billionaires to implement the bold mission of extracting resources from near-Earth asteroids.

If you get asteroids about a kilometer in size, those are large enough and carry enough energy into our system to disrupt transportation, communication, the food chains, and that can be a really bad day on Earth.

Before we give you billions more, we want to know what you've done with the trillion you've got.

We need to take command of the solar system to gain that wealth, and to escape the sea of paper our government is becoming, and for some decent chance of stopping a Dinosaur Killer asteroid.

I hope that by 2050 the entire solar system will have been explored and mapped by flotillas of tiny robotic craft.

We are involved in technology development for, you know, missions that we hope to plan that would take us to an asteroid and eventually to Mars.

Americans who read the papers or watch Jay Leno have been aware for some time now that there is a slim but real possibility - about 1 in 45,000 - that an 850-foot-long asteroid called Apophis could strike Earth with catastrophic consequences on April 13, 2036.

Sooner or later the space program will need to save us by detecting and deflecting an incoming asteroid.

I never knew the word 'billion' when I was a kid.