Many places on our planet are rich in natural resources – take Australia’s iron ore, and Brazil’s gold and uranium, for example.

Anywhere with reserves of natural resources naturally makes a lot of money, with this only set to increase as the resource gets rarer – or, in the case of lithium, for example, as it gets more and more in demand.

Eventually, however, the Earth’s resources will run out, or become prohibitively expensive because of their scarcity.

Where would we turn to then? Well, there’s a reason that renewables have become such hot property; at the same time, in the case of valuable ores, researchers have set their sights further afield, to space.

And according to researcher Jayanth Chennamangalam, a rich source of some of the Earth’s most useful metals – including platinum, palladium, and iridium – though a little far away, could be in view right now.

If you’re reading that at night, this is.

That’s because, in a new paper published in the journal Planetary and Space Science, Chennamangalam explains how the moon’s craters are likely to contain significant amounts of these resources, including over $1 trillion of platinum.

How? Well, Chennamangalam looked to the moon’s craters, in particular those whose diameters measure over 0.6 miles – of which there are over one million – and estimated that almost 6,500 of those were created by platinum-containing asteroids, meaning that the resource would be present within the crater.

It is worth noting that we can’t just go and mine the moon – or other resource-rich asteroids, as has been suggested in the past – thanks to international agreements that no one has a claim on space.

However, in an interview with New Scientist, Chennamangalam hoped that potential future space mining could transcend national and international borders, and instead be used to benefit humankind as a whole and the funding and progression of the scientific field as a priority.

This would essentially make space exploration self-sustaining so governments could prioritise their spending elsewhere:

“Today, astronomy is done to satiate our curiosity. It has very few practical applications and is mostly paid for by taxpayer money, meaning that research funding is at the mercy of governmental policy. If we can monetise space resources — be it on the Moon or on asteroids — private enterprises will invest in the exploration of the solar system.”

Of course, the legislation, precedent and protocol for space mining would be tricky to establish at first, so it’s unlikely to happen soon – and for some this is a good thing. After wreaking havoc on our own planet and environment, many would argue that we shouldn’t mess with anything further out in the universe, lest an Icarus moment befall us.

But if it were of universal benefit of our planet, sustainable, and effective, it’s hard to envisage a future in which this practice wouldn’t happen – after all, for better or for worse, when have humans held back on resource extraction before?

If you thought that was interesting, you might like to read about the mysterious “pyramids” discovered in Antarctica. What are they?