Save your money. You can stop throwing your hard-earned dollars away on lottery tickets. They are passé. You can skip the weekly (daily?) trip to the convenience store to place your bet. I have a surefire winning formula to become rich. Not just millionaire rich, but billionaire rich!
It won’t cost you a penny. The government is arranging for your largesse to arrive. Here’s the deal.
A while ago, NASA launched a space mission to capture an asteroid named 16 Psyche. It is not just any old asteroid. It is 173 miles across and 144 miles wide, which is about 64,000 square miles or the size of the state of Florida.
Why travel 2,500,000,000 miles and wait five years until 2029 to capture this monster, you may ask? Because the scientists believe it is rich in the minerals iron, gold and nickel. They estimate its value at (are you sitting down?) $10,000,000,000,000,000,000! That’s 10 million, million, million dollars or $10 quintillion simoleons.
If they do capture it, mine it and return the motherload back to earth, they say every person on earth would become a billionaire. Unfortunately, NASA has announced that their intention is not to mine the treasure, but only to study it. Bummer.
There goes my get-rich-quick scheme. Still one can dream, can’t one?
What would I do with a billion dollars? Well, I’ll tell you what I wouldn’t do, I wouldn’t buy a bunch of mansions and five vintage cars like Edwin Castro did in California. He won a billion-dollar lottery prize in 2022. His neighbors at one of his $25,000,000 mansions are Leonardo DiCaprio and Ariana Grande. I’m sure they wouldn’t want me as their neighbor … nor I them. I understand they throw big parties, and I’m not a big party guy.
Let me see, if I splurged and spent a million dollars a day, it would take 1,000 days or 2.7 years to go broke. I’d be better off putting it in a savings account, but only $250,000 is insured so that wouldn’t be very smart. If I took the billion in ones, it would be a stack 68 miles high, too big to stash under my pillow.
I could buy Tom Brady’s new 30,000 square-foot house. My current house is 1,400 square feet. I’d get lost in his for sure. No, that’s out. How about an island? I saw one on Google just off the coast of Greece that’s going for $43,300,000. Naw, too far away. Something a bit closer would be more to my liking. Say, one in the Caribbean that is listed for $29,000,000. I’d still need a plane to get there. I heard one rich billionaire who recently held high office is selling a 757 jet for the small sum of $100,000,000. I guess he needs the money.
Maybe, a yacht would fit the bill. A Russian oligarch’s former boat is on the market for a cool $263,000,000. Even if I had a billion dollars, that’s too rich for me just to get to a Caribbean Island. I was brought up to be very frugal.
It occurs to me, if NASA were to make every person on the planet a billionaire, who’d clean my mega mansion … not me! Who’d fly my jet or sail my yacht? Who’d grow our food, make our cars and clothing. Who’d make anything? Everyone would just sit around with nothing to do except count their money.
That would get boring fast.
Hey NASA, go ahead keep your asteroid. I am happy buying lottery tickets even if I never win.
Mattapoisett resident Dick Morgado is an artist and happily retired writer. His newspaper columns appeared for many years in daily newspapers around Boston.
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By Dick Morgado