Jeff Bezos has a vision to colonize space with a trillion people

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/ar-BB1ob0NC

by elsewhen • 2 years ago

12 22 2 years ago

quantified2• 2 years ago

I look forward to people figuring out how to create a sustainable biosphere out of raw materials when we can't figure out how to keep a pre-existing rich one healthy. Somehow the economic incentives in the outposts will prevent them from screwing things up?

If they are small enough they could keep a lid on the entropy from divergent human behaviors, including the basic tendency to say "I can waste this/destroy this, my action doesn't affect the whole very much". But they also need to be large enough to be functional. If they're all fully automated and people just need to live their lives- wish we could have that on Earth, but economically it will never happen.

JohnMakin• 2 years ago

I look forward to people figuring out how to create a sustainable biosphere out of raw materials when we can't figure out how to keep a pre-existing rich one healthy.

This is what I always raise when people start fantasizing breathlessly about mars colonization. Even if we possessed the technology to terraform a planet like mars in a way that could sustain human life long term, the presumable incentives to doing so (escaping a decreasingly habitable earth) don't make sense, because we could then just use that technology to terraform our own environment.

None of it makes sense because it's fantasy used to raise money.

DarmokJalad17012• 2 years ago

the presumable incentives to doing so (escaping a decreasingly habitable earth)

Is that the only incentive? Is that one that is officially claimed as the reasoning for any of the current such endeavors?

theonething• 2 years ago

we can't figure out how to keep a pre-existing rich one healthy

greenfield projects are always more fun (until they become messes as well)

hooverd• 2 years ago

Da inyalowda think that by just going to space it'll solve all our problems, ke?

DonsDiscountGas• 2 years ago

I always wonder about this. I tend to assume that people like Bezos and Musk aren't stupid, but rather saying what people want to hear. "Colonize Mars" is more inspiring than "launch a lot of stuff into orbit" to people I guess. And the latter may well be worth the money to humanity.

allears• 2 years ago

Mr. Bezos can have any vision he wants, drug-induced or not. My personal vision is that I can flap my arms and fly to the Moon. Unfortunately, neither vision has any basis in reality.

beretguy• 2 years ago

Sounds like money laundering project.

dotcoma2• 2 years ago

A trillion people?

Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds…

ramon156• 2 years ago

I also have the same vision, can i also get an article?

dotcoma2• 2 years ago

Are you on the B-list, as in: billionaire ?

nirav72• 2 years ago

He’ll live barely long enough to maybe see handful of people stay on the moon for a brief period. We’re not even close to having a sustainable habitat even on the moon. Let alone anywhere else.

iwontberude• 2 years ago

His vision assumes living is always worthwhile, even if it means living your entire life precariously on a spaceship orbiting a distant moon of another planet.

ugjka• 2 years ago

They'll need to get busy if they'll want trillion people

effed3• 2 years ago

A trillion people to sell something to. genial, just imagine the delivery. Seriously, it sounds like -look at the sky, forget about down here-, propaganda to distract about all the real problems we have on the third planet.

polski-g• 2 years ago

Then he should spend time figuring out how to raise fertility or lobby for cloning or artificial wombs. The human species is on a terminal decline.

arp242• 2 years ago

If we had a trillion humans, we would have, at any given time, 1,000 Mozarts and 1,000 Einsteins

We'd also have 1,000 Hitlers and 1,000 Breiviks. Just sayin'.

Aside from the fact that you can use his argument in exactly the opposite way, this kind of stuff doesn't scale linearly anyway; certainly when it comes to music there's already far more talent out there than any human being can reasonably listen to. We also need to wonder if we really want a musical world dominated by "Mozarts".

We also had "1,000 Einsteins" in the 20th century already. Most people here can probably name a few dozen physicists on at least the same level as Einstein. Then there's probably quite a few "lesser (or unknown) known geniuses", people working in other fields, etc. etc. This might scale a bit better than music, but it's not clear to me this has that much potential for scaling either, because a lot of discoveries aren't a "just genius working in his office", but require complex machinery and all of that. We'd also have to build a few dozen LHCs.

Bezos views on all of this seem almost shockingly simplistic.

kristianp• 2 years ago

Actual article link that isn't within msn.com:

https://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-plan-colonize-spa...

hammyhavoc• 2 years ago

He must be on the good stuff.

friend_and_foe• 2 years ago

I'm convinced that this guy sees Musk and his outlandish statements and thinks that must be the secret to success and so tries the same thing, but going even further. What he seems to fail to realize, which is strange because what he does deliver in value shows that he gets it in other realms of business, is that you have to actually deliver something. It doesn't have to be your exact claims, but something approximating them.

Musk says he wants to colonize mars. He's currently testing his 2nd generation rocket that's capable of carrying 100 people. His car is orbiting the sun. Bezos says he wants to colonize space with a trillion people, so far he hasn't gotten so much as a brick into low earth orbit, much less even articulated how to create a trillion people.

But he built one of the worlds foremost and innovative logistics networks. I don't understand, he's not disconnected from reality, the existence of amazon proves that. So why the bullshit on space?

Jeff Bezos has a vision to colonize space with a trillion people

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