Out there in the Solar System, there exists an asteroid with the designated name, 16 Psyche. It contains a rich deposit of nickel-iron minerals, which can be worth $10,000 Quadrillion. That’s worth more than the combined economy of the entire planet multiplied by a thousand. Despite the massive catastrophe that such a resource could bring to the planet, NASA is fast-tracking its plans to mine said asteroid anyway.

Now, it’s not really that big of a jump since the mission to send a probe over to Psyche was originally scheduled for 2023 and it was only moved to 2022, Science Alert reports. Then again, the team behind the project did find a way to make the journey to the asteroid a lot more efficient, which slashes four years from the original travel time.

It’s worth noting that there are a few economic and scientific challenges that need to be addressed when going to Psyche. For starters, there’s the matter of the planet’s total economic value being at only $78 trillion. That’s basically all of the money found in all of the Earth’s nations, a lot of which are not even based on physical goods.

Should NASA or any other space agency succeed in mining the giant asteroid, it could easily collapse the world’s economy a billion-fold. This is not just an issue of oversaturation either.

Then there’s the challenge of getting the machines that will be drilling into the rocket all the way to the asteroid belt without getting squished by all the other space rocks floating around in the area. Companies like SpaceX are making great strides in space travel technologies, but even then, it would take decades or centuries before Psyche is in danger of getting mined.

Regardless of the dangers and challenges that it presents, however, NASA’s decision to up the timeline to get to Psyche is expected to have a profound effect on space mining. As Futurism points out, such a monumental endeavor might actually have a uniting influence on the human race as a whole.