When you were a little kid, and everyone else was all, “oh, I want to be a fireman,” “I want to be a policeman,” “I want to make tuna melts for two children and then drive them to soccer,” were you saying to yourself something more like, “I’d like to expand our reach beyond the Earth into the solar system”? If so, it’s your lucky day, because Planetary Resources, an asteroid mining start-up backed by Larry Page and James Cameron, is recruiting paid interns to start work this January. This video should give you some idea of what Planetary Resources does.
So yes, asteroids are indeed giant things that have the potential to come hurtling towards Earth to crush everything in their path, but they’re also so much more. Asteroids contain important useful stuff, like precious metals — platinum, palladium, osmium, and iridium, but let’s face it, mostly platinum, which starts with P, which stands for “people will pay out the ass for that.” So these dudes think they can probably make a fortune mining asteroids. How, exactly, do you mine an asteroid? That’s what the intern will help figure out.
Interns should have majored in nerdy science/computer stuff and have a 3.2 average. They should also have an idea how to get precious metals out of an asteroid, because if Planetary Resources knows for sure how exactly they’re going to pull this off, they aren’t telling. Oh, and they should be good at fetching coffee from a very, very long way away.
