I feel that the 1st trillionaires will appear in the next 50 to 100 years and I believe it will come from space based energy production. Today the main barrier to using resources from space is the tremendous cost of launching stuff into orbit and then the long travel times to get from place to place within our own solar system.
The US Airforce and NASA are both working on scramjet technology (ref US Air Force working on new hypersonic scramjet capable of Mach 5 speeds). Because a Scramjet could eventually reach mach 8+ and also reach the edge of outer space, AND because it uses O2 from the atmosphere (rather than carrying the heavy gas as a rocket does) it is a much more efficient and much much cheaper way to get to orbit (a small rocket would give the final push to orbit).
Another technology being developed (by the UK) is a jet / rocket hybrid (ref The SABRE Engine) which also burns O2 from the atmosphere through most of its climb to orbit.
Either if these technologies can result in a 90% drop in launch costs per pound of payload.
Once in orbit, plasma engines could move payloads (and people) around in much less time than chemical rockets do (ref video…this engine was tested on the ISS)
These technologies together would make space based travel (at least within our solar system) cheap and fast AND allow for giant solar panels to be built in space (solar panels on earth are less efficient because the atmosphere blocks most of the sun’s energy from reaching earth…In space the panels would produce about 4 to 8 times the electricity of earth based panels making them very efficient and low cost producers of energy PLUS there are no clouds in space….Panels could run 24/7 year round.
Also we could put the panels in an orbit CLOSER to the sun…energy per area goes up by the SQUARE of the distance decrease….In other words. move the panels to around Mercury’s orbit (~1/3 the distance of earth from the sun) and the energy production goes up by 9 times (3×3)…The energy produced would be beamed back to earth via microwave (the technology to do this has already been tested).
So eventually, just as military aircraft technology became privatized and the airline industry was born, and just as military jet engines gave way to privately built jet engines ushering in the jet age, eventually scram jet/hybrid rocket and ion engine technology will become commercialized also…People will be able to vacation in orbiting luxury motels (what a view!) or holiday on the moon or mars for about what a cruise casts today (in future inflation adjusted dollars AND energy costs will PLUMMET meaning the cost of producing everything also plummets!
We will see incredible industrial growth (a 2nd industrial revolution that makes the 1st one look tiny) and all based on now CLEAN energy. And we haven’t even considered all wealth from the metals that could also be mined from asteroids!
To get an idea of the kind of growth we’re talking about, consider that today the USA has ~7% of the world’s population and consumes 40% of its resources…When the rest of the world catches up, that’s a world economy 6Xs bigger than today AND let’s say in the next 50 yrs the US GDP doubles per person and world population also doubles…that’s a world economy 24Xs bigger than today!
The 1st entrepreneurs to tap into this heap of clean energy production will surely become trillionaires but that’s OK because we’ll ALL get wealthier in the process!
Think of it this way…Suppose I went back to the 1700’s and found the richest person in the USA (then Britain) and said hey, I can bring you 300 yrs in the future and give you an average paying job but you’ll have TV, Cars, better health, painless surgery/painless dental, indoor plumbing, hot cold running water, …In other words, they would quickly see that they could live much better today as an average person than 300 yrs ago as a rich person…..Then I say but there’s a catch… 80% of the wealth is owned by 7% of the people….The 1700’s person says, “I DON’T CARE, I want that Painless dentistry!!”
If you went back and told Rockefeller, Carnegie, or Vanderbilt that today even in a recession, the USA produces about 1,300 NEW millionaires a DAY, they would think you were daft….So to have trillionaires in 50-100 years is not farfetched at all.