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Jeff Bezos: I spend my billions on space because we’re destroying Earth
- DangerChips 7y agoThe future can't come fast enough. Resource extraction being off-world would be a huge boon environmentally and I can't think of a better use of resources to help preserve our species.
- cutler 7y agoWhat exactly is this resource extraction you're referring to?
- arthurcolle 7y agoAsteroid mining most likely
- aylmao 7y agoI'm less worried about resource extraction, and more worried about pollution. Sure, mining pollutes and we have a limited number of minerals in the world. The bigger problem IMO is the destruction of the biosphere. Trees are being cut faster than they are planted, fish are being fished faster that they can reproduce, etc. There's no biosphere on asteroids. Moreover, would finding another source for resources reduce the incentive to preserve the ones we have locally? For example, in the future, if plastics become scarce, plastic products will become more expensive and people will consume less of them. Let's suppose we learn how to synthesize plastics from compounds found in asteroids. It would be business as usual, and the insane amount of pollution in landfills and oceans would only keep growing, would it not?
- cableshaft 7y ago>Trees are being cut faster than they are planted This part doesn't seem to be true anymore, thanks primarily to India and China (this popped up on Hacker News a couple of weeks ago, I think): https://www.nasa.gov/feature/ames/human-activity-in-china-and-india-dominates-the-greening-of-earth-nasa-study-shows https://www.nasa.gov/feature/ames/human-activity-in-china-an...
- aylmao 7y agoAmazing news! Thanks for sharing.
- mikepurvis 7y agoPretty ironic for this to land on Prime day, literally an orgy of splurging on underpriced cheap junk to be next-day shipped in brown cardboard boxes right to everyone's door.
- dsaavy 7y agoWarning: Opinion I’m a little conflicted, Amazon as a company has enabled an even greater level of wasteful consumerism. Bezos seems to be trying to solve a problem he has helped accelerate. I just don’t know how many other ways you can try to take on a mission like Blue Origin without building a massive fortune off of current unsustainable practices. Kind of seems like digging a bigger hole and using profit off of dirt sales to fund an experimental dirt filling business. Plus, how much impact could someone like Bezos have in the reversal of desertification and expansion of practices like permaculture? That would seem like a way to extend the timeline for space exploration while helping preserve what we currently have on Earth.
- dlivingston 7y agoI would argue that it's the fault of the consumer, not Amazon. Amazon simply provides a centralized place to 'consume' - it does not (in most cases) manufacture goods, it simply consolidates goods into one place. Let's flip your argument on its head. If Amazon only had three customers, would they be enabling wasteful consumerism? If so, why? If so, wouldn't literally every online or offline marketplace be enabling wasteful consumerism? If not, why? How many customers / year need to visit before they become the monster you claim? Or is it a gradient? If so, then what is their responsibility - to only let a certain threshold of people purchase goods every year, and turn the rest of consumers away?
- omarchowdhury 7y agoIt takes two (or more) to tango. It's everyone's fault.
- dlivingston 7y agoI think that commenters here are thinking far too narrowly. If I, as a consumer, have $XXX disposable income, then I am going to spend it on A, B, and C. If Amazon lowers the prices of goods, then I am going to spend it on A, B, C, and D. If Amazon, as a company, is interested in maximizing profits (which: duh), they are going to do that in one of two ways. Either they increase the cost of goods, leaving them less competitive to Walmart et al., or they increase their profit margins by minimizing other factors in the supply chain / company. Both groups are behaving exactly as one would predict, and exactly how you or I would behave as consumers or as CEO of Amazon. To say "it's everyone's fault" is ignoring the intrinsic human nature of consumers and the intrinsic Darwinian survival mechanisms via profit maximization of Amazon.
- cutler 7y agoYeah, right. So we can't afford to feed, house and cloth a large percentage of the world's population yet we're somehow going to send them all into space?#@% Sorry, does not compute. As far as I'm aware no-one has discovered oxygen on either the Moon or Mars so, again, does not compute.
- malandrew 7y agoYou don't need to send them all into space. You just send the 1% that actually has the power to make a difference into space because: “Everybody who goes to space says they come back a little changed and they realize how beautiful this planet is and how small and fragile it is. Something that we can’t see when we are down here, but from up there it becomes obvious.”
- omarchowdhury 7y agoAre you being sarcastic? Please tell me you are.
- malandrew 7y agoNo, I'm not. I actually read the article and exercised the principle of charity.
- hnaccy 7y agoThe goal isn't to save "a large percentage of the world's population"...
- root_axis 7y agoWell that logic doesn't make much sense either; a vagrant's life on the street will be a lot more comfortable than a billionaire living in space for the foreseeable future.
- kpU8efre7r 7y agoBezos- you're part of the consumerist world-raping for profit problem.
- elkos 7y agoI'm biased but I would think that if someone chooses to invest on space on it would make sense to reach out and assist non-profits that work on developing open space technologies too. Disclaimer: I'm part of one such organisation
- Mc_Big_G 7y agoIs it not obvious that surviving in space or the moon or mars is infinitely more difficult than just changing our ways? Bezos has been consumed by his own bubble of existence. He fantasizes about a world where only he can afford to exist, assuming I guess that he'll achieve immortality. The earth would be better off with him not on it.
- mruts 7y agoAmazon in the second most admired company (behind Apple) according to forbes[1]. So I think it's safe to say that almost everyone disagrees with you. [1]https://fortune.com/worlds-most-admired-companies/ https://fortune.com/worlds-most-admired-companies/
- JohnFen 7y ago> it's safe to say that almost everyone disagrees with you. That may or may not be true, but you can't tell from that Fortune link. It doesn't explain how that list was compiled, what counts as being "admired", and so forth. Without knowing that stuff, the list is meaningless. I would speculate, though, that since this is Fortune magazine, the list is probably about who is the most admired by the business community (and skewed toward the community of larger businesses). If that's the case, then we're talking about the opinion of a relatively small segment of society and so it isn't representative of what "almost everyone" thinks.
- erentz 7y agoThis kind of thing is motivated reasoning. Elon is guilty of it too. They want to play with space technology, then go searching for moral justifications that don’t add up. Anything we might do in space or to try to live on Mars is much-much (much) more difficult than fixing what problems we have on Earth to keep it healthy and habitable. These people would be better spending money here if they really cared.
- devoply 7y agoExactly and they even know what those things might be, they just rather live in la-la land and imagination rather than reality. For one thing, Bezos, use your damn money and buy as much land as you can and set it aside as pristine reserve. And then make it so that this land can never be sold by your heirs under any circumstance. Do it all over the world, use your drones to patrol it. Something that you can do with your wealth relatively easily which makes a difference.
- chillacy 7y agoThere are definitely a lot of people finding moral justification for their lifestyles. Actually one of the more interesting ideas I heard is that this is how deist religions came about: early farmers had a tough time domesticating animals with animist religions (where each animal has a spirit and can be talked to) and so needed to remove the guilt that came with owning and slaughtering animals. By moving the spirit away from the animal directly and towards an animal god, they were able to absolve themselves of the guilt.
- malandrew 7y agoseeing as we evolved from animals that don't appear to experience guilt about eating other animals, I find it implausible that feeling guilt is the original state and not a pro-social trait that evolved much much later as we started forming societies.
- chillacy 7y agoThat’s correct, guilt would be something that evolves with social structure, but social structure arose pre-hunter-gatherer. The jump to agriculture took hundreds of thousands of years after the first hominids (pre sapiens).
- bronzeage 7y agowith the way the rocket equation works (fuel is always a fixed percentage of the payload), I'm very doubtful there will ever be an economic incentive to mine materials in space, or manufacture anything without a huge price / weight ratio. space is not really an option, we've got only one place and people like bezos will ruin it while pretending there's a plan b.
- bilbyx 7y agoSo we can go and destroy another planet? Better to invest billions in teraforming tech and cleanup on Earth. This will benefit all and not just the rich. I also wonder how much carbon emission building and sending rockets to space produces.
- curesForCancer 7y agoBig deal. People jumped on wooden boats and sailed around the globe looking for spices and opium, instead of discovering microbiology and curing the bubonic plague. Have at it, bro.
- aussiegreenie 7y agoWhat load of junk. If he is worried about saving the Earth. For the price of a single rocket, he could seriously change the politics of Climate Change.
- chillacy 7y agoWe could have fed people instead of doing the Apollo program, or building luxury condos, or producing a blockbuster movie. There’s always a holier than thou cause out there.
- akeck 7y agoSilver bullet solution to a lead bullet problem. https://a16z.com/2011/11/13/lead-bullets/ https://a16z.com/2011/11/13/lead-bullets/