6 ms·

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

12 points by elsewhen 2y ago

quantified 2y 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 2y 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.
  - DarmokJalad1701 2y 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?
    - quantified 2y ago
      It's been shared by some number of people, perhaps not by these few who are actually in a position to influence the effort. But I think this sort of counts: > "Why are we doing this?" Musk said at the company's February 2022 Starship progress update. "I think this is an incredibly important thing for the future of life itself ... there's always some chance that something could go wrong on Earth. Dinosaurs are not around anymore!" [https://www.inverse.com/innovation/spacex-mars-city-codex https://www.inverse.com/innovation/spacex-mars-city-codex]
      - DarmokJalad1701 2y ago
        I believe he is talking about black swan event like an asteroid impact. Not the current problems with climate change. It's more about there being another branch of humanity that's thriving than for people to "escape".
- theonething 2y 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 2y ago
  Da inyalowda think that by just going to space it'll solve all our problems, ke?
- DonsDiscountGas 2y 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 2y 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 2y ago
Sounds like money laundering project.
- fikjusulta 2y ago
  [dead]
dotcoma 2y ago
A trillion people? Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds…
ramon156 2y ago
I also have the same vision, can i also get an article?
- dotcoma 2y ago
  Are you on the B-list, as in: billionaire ?
nirav72 2y 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 2y 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 2y ago
  They'll need to get busy if they'll want trillion people
effed3 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
kristianp 2y ago
Actual article link that isn't within msn.com: https://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-plan-colonize-space-experts-say-2024-6 https://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-plan-colonize-spa...
hammyhavoc 2y ago
He must be on the good stuff.
friend_and_foe 2y 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?

12 points by elsewhen 2y 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 2y 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.
- DarmokJalad1701 2y 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?
  - quantified 2y ago
    It's been shared by some number of people, perhaps not by these few who are actually in a position to influence the effort. But I think this sort of counts: > "Why are we doing this?" Musk said at the company's February 2022 Starship progress update. "I think this is an incredibly important thing for the future of life itself ... there's always some chance that something could go wrong on Earth. Dinosaurs are not around anymore!" [https://www.inverse.com/innovation/spacex-mars-city-codex https://www.inverse.com/innovation/spacex-mars-city-codex]
    - DarmokJalad1701 2y ago
      I believe he is talking about black swan event like an asteroid impact. Not the current problems with climate change. It's more about there being another branch of humanity that's thriving than for people to "escape".
theonething 2y 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 2y ago
Da inyalowda think that by just going to space it'll solve all our problems, ke?
DonsDiscountGas 2y 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 2y 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 2y ago

Sounds like money laundering project.

fikjusulta 2y ago
[dead]

dotcoma 2y ago

A trillion people? Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds…

ramon156 2y ago

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

dotcoma 2y ago
Are you on the B-list, as in: billionaire ?

nirav72 2y 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 2y 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 2y ago
They'll need to get busy if they'll want trillion people

effed3 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

kristianp 2y ago

Actual article link that isn't within msn.com: https://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-plan-colonize-space-experts-say-2024-6 https://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-plan-colonize-spa...

hammyhavoc 2y ago

He must be on the good stuff.

friend_and_foe 2y 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?