Slashdot Mirror
We Need To Build Industrial Zones In Space In Order To Save Earth, Says Jeff Bezos (cnbc.com)
Onstage at the Code Conference, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos said that we have to start bringing parts of the industrial economy to space in order to "save Earth." Bezos also said that we must protect our planet, adding that we don't want to live in a retrograde world where "we have to freeze population growth." From the report: Bezos says tasks that require lots of energy shouldn't be handled on Earth. Instead, we should perform them in space, and that will happen within the next few hundred years. "Energy is limited here. In at least a few hundred years... all of our heavy industry will be moved off-planet," Bezos added. "Earth will be zoned residential and light industrial. You shouldn't be doing heavy energy on earth. We can build gigantic chip factories in space." Solar energy, for instance, is more practical for factories in space, he said. "We don't have to actually build them here," he said. "The Earth shades itself, [whereas] in space you can get solar power 24/7. ... The problem with other planets ... people will visit Mars, and we will settle Mars, and people should because it's cool, but for heavy industry, I would actually put it in space."
Raw materials.
You've just increased their costs hundred-fold, even if manufacturing were "free", power were "free" and delivery back to Earth comes free courtesy of gravity.
It's costs millions to put a few hundred kilos into orbit. Let alone getting it somewhere useful. And capturing, refining and using material already in space is basically 100% unproven at the moment - we've literally never done it and have no idea of the associated costs.
His ignorance of how solar works is pretty apparent from what he's saying. The flux of photons in space is about 1/3 more than than on earth (1366W/sq. meter in space vs 1000W/sq. meter on earth). Woopee. So you'd be willing to build factories and solar farms IN SPACE to get slightly more power? Nevermind that it will be thousands of times more expensive to put them in space; the radiation in space quickly renders all but the most expensive solar options non-functional in less than a year. This is a very stupid idea.
Economics: Population growth is tied to scarcity. New technology reduces scarcity--when you scale up, you eventually stop adding 10% more human labor time (wages!) for 10% more e.g. food, and start adding 20% for 10% growth, and stuff gets expensive, and we lose the capacity to produce everything to scale with population--and that means population can grow without experiencing downward pressure. Freezing population growth would play all kinds of hell on the monetary system, and isn't a viable option for *many* reasons; it's also an economic behavior tied to technology.
Energy argument: Solar energy in space still would require massive collectors; the cost and scale of labor to put them up there, assemble them, maintain them, and operate them would be huge, incurring immense costs. It's really easy to pipe billions of barrels of oil into a building and burn them; it's really hard to collect that much sunlight. This argument holds true mostly for large-scale, high-consumption factories: a steel mill in space won't have any notable output capacity unless it's stationed on a dyson sphere with power cables run to it.
This guy doesn't realize he's talking about hundreds of megawatts here, entire power stations for single factories.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
>> we don't want to live in a retrograde world where "we have to freeze population growth.
We're already at a point where the more educated/affluent you are, the fewer kids you have. Why is the converse so bad?
While I am generally in favor of establishing an orbital industrial base, the mention of orbiting "heavy industry" seems a bit strange. The high cost of lifting material into orbit, even with reduced-cost reusable boosters, would seem to rule out any industry where the term "heavy" equates to "raw materials that weigh a lot."
Don't expect to see, say, metals refining or glassmaking in orbit until we can access the asteroid belt's raw materials; we're far more likely to see industries with a high value-to-mass ratio, like semiconductor fabrication (which the article does mention), that can take best advantage of really hard vacuum, near-total lack of particulate contamination, and the ability to create extremely vibration-free environments. For my money, semiconductor fabrication is probably the killer app for space-based industrialization.
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
The flux of photons in space is about 1/3 more than than on earth (1366W/sq. meter in space vs 1000W/sq. meter on earth).
Not at night which, to be fair, was his point.
I can't begin to understand why someone would seriously suggest something so ridiculous. After we have a fully working space tether, sure. Before that, absolutely not.
-SR
... who always followed the mantra that growing a business is more important than making it profitable. So in his world, there cannot possibly be limits of growth just because earth has limited surface/resources, and just because bringing things into space is extremely expensive (and usually costs more energy than that thing could harvest in space).
To any reasonable person, of course, his opinion is total bullshit.
... all of our heavy industry will be moved off-planet," ...
Yes, because smelting steel in zero-gravity will be lots of fun and can be powered 100% with solar. Not to mention the easy access to all the raw materials in Earth orbit.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Actually I was more intrigued by his suggestion that we should never freeze population growth. I'm not quite sure how he plans to do this with his plan. We might be able to increase the sustainable population limit using resources from space, although apart from the cost I doubt all the rocket launches required will hep the planet much. However that is just putting off the inevitable. Unless we figure out the technology required to get people off the planet and settle elsewhere we are going to hit a population limit at some point and likely in the not too distant future with or without space resources.
It never occurred to you just exactly why there's a huge commercial race now to dramatically lower the cost per lb of getting things into orbit?
Or the fact that space is LITERALLY littered with raw materials.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
In the 1960s rockets landing on their tail and being reused was science fiction, unproven, and its associated costs unknown. 50 years later its doable and its costs known and its the less expensive tech.
... We already know how to mine the water and do quite useful stuff with it (drinking, breathing O2, H2+O2 for fuel, ...). Other simple and available organic compounds also have quite well known processes and uses.
Bezos specified he's talking about a hundred or more years in the future. In fifty years we went from aircraft that were little more than wooden/canvas structures with engines to landing on the moon. We are already landing on asteroids, already doing long range commercial analysis,
The missing pieces are largely matters of engineering not scientific understanding, and the engineering often not far removed from today's capabilities. And the economics of it all is largely a matter of scale. Apollo 11 bringing back a bag of rocks is like building Intel's i7 CPU fab and only building 100 CPUs. Those CPUs are awfully damn expensive. Now start doing things at scale and quantity as Bezos is talking about. And also as Bezos discusses, be sure to factor in the external costs of that earth bound manufacturing, particular health and environmental costs when your make comparisons, not simply the cost of the goods sold.
Some of you are concentrating on the lack of resources necessary for heavy industry. That's not really the problem. There are a ton of resources in space - lots of them in asteroid belts that are not in a gravity well, it's the lack of people that's a problem.
Even assuming we built a robot factory up there to build more robots to run the heavy industry, we would need so many people that commuting costs becomes cost prohibitive.
The only way it works is if the people live in space, then we end up with families moving to space for the jobs, and it's not 'moving the heavy industry', it's moving the population.
Now, there is one thing we COULD build in space and send back to earth - without a massive human population - and that's solar power. Which would have the real danger of global warming on a scale never before seen.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
that would never have been if their creators had listened to all of the armchair inventors on /.
Elon Musk wants us to build human colonies on Mars. Jeff Bezos has a slightly more measured take.
I don't think the author of the article understands what "measured" means.
People criticize the colonization of Mars as unrealistic, but most of those plans involve making things destined for Martian consumption on Mars itself and using martian materials. Say what you will about Mars, but it's a whole planet. There's always building materials within easy reach, if you're not too picky about their specific composition
But as others have noted, Bezos's plan pretty much presupposes that every raw material that goes into every orbital factory has had a rocket strapped to it at some point, to bring it either from the surface of the Earth or from somewhere else in the solar system. That's got to be a hell of a freight charge.
So no, I don't think Bezos did a whole lot of "measurement" before opining on things. It's called talking out of your ass. I do it, you do it, everybody does it. The right thing to do is just to ignore it, even when a billionaire does it.
we don't want to live in a retrograde world where "we have to freeze population growth."
We don't?
Because I sure as hell do. When I was born, human population was almost exactly 3 billion. Now it is 7.2 billion... no, wait, that's wrong already. Last time I looked was months ago. 7.4 billion now, per wikipedia.
Too many humans IS the main problem. Even if you address the energy problems, what about all the other problems caused by human over-population?
And yet there are large tracts of the planet which are not uninhabitable and yet have very low population densities. There is plenty of land, plenty of potentially arable land, plenty of fresh water. Yet it isn't used because the distribution of humans on planet Earth is extremely uneven and concentrated into pockets. So, looking at these densely populated locations with their food supply and fresh water problems you can get the mistaken impression that we are overpopulating the planet.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
"You don't want to live in a retrograde world where we have to freeze population growth."
Does he have any concept that the planet is effectively a closed system? He just expects the population to continue to grow unchecked?
But isn't continuous, unchecked growth the very basis of capitalism???
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
By the time you ship a batch of processors from Mars, it will be outdated by the time it gets to Earth :-)
No need to ship the processors from Mars to Earth!
The thing with Mars is its cold, so its an ideal place for data centers
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
So, Amazon will move from drone delivery to lobbing your packages down from orbit. "Package vaporized in re-entry" will be added to the refund options.
Manufacturing most plastics requires petroleum. You can't get that from an asteroid, it has to be lifted off the ground.
You can manufacture plastic from carboniferous material; it doesn't have to be petroleum.
You could get raw materials to make plastic from carbonaceous chondrites, I expect, if plastic is indeed high on the list of materials you need to make.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
We do have a habit of ruining the Earth's ecosystem in order to get access to raw minerals, so in this regard, Mr. Bezos is correct. However, it should be noted that we are already destroying the ecosystem with our chemical fuel power sources and discarded products. If we really want to save the Earth, we should 1) focus on moving away from chemical power sources to electromagnetic power sources and 2) reprocessing and recycling 100% of things that have been discarded (including sewage).
If we manage these two things, the Earth will have been mostly saved and we can shift more focus toward geoengineering and external mineral sources. That is how the Earth could be saved.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
...except for the energy you're expending to get all your equipment and raw materials into orbit.
Of course, we could, someday, harvest most of our raw materials from comets and asteroids. Sure, I'd love to see this in my lifetime. I'm not optimistic, though.
Not to mention, everyone does not need to breed.
You sound like noted Progressive Margaret Sanger. To be fair, she just wanted to sterilize unknowing black women and others she deemed as undesirables. I'm sure you mean to apply this to everyone amiright?
if we want to save the planet earth, more scientists, less billionaires.
Elon Musk wants us to build human colonies on Mars. Jeff Bezos has a slightly more measured take.
I don't think the author of the article understands what "measured" means....
So no, I don't think Bezos did a whole lot of "measurement" before opining on things.
Measured:
4. deliberate and restrained; careful: measured language; measured terms.
This reminds me of an old SNL skit. Johnny Canal.
Proverbs 21:19
My first reaction was that this was ridiculous, but on second thought the concept itself is not actually all that wrong. It simply relies on a very specific barrier that has not been overcome yet: Gravity. Industrial endeavors of any kind are all very heavy, and current launch methods are all horribly inefficient (the best currently is the Ariane 5 at a little under 39% payload/vehicle weight, but it's still more or less a one-use/disposable vehicle). So for industry of any scale the cost of actually getting the necessary equipment far outweighs, massively outweighs, dare I say it, even ASTRONOMICALLY outweighs any savings you'd have from doing the work in space with a Zero-G environment and 24-hour solar power available (both very real but not immense savings). There is a reason that the International Space Station is the single most expensive object ever created by mankind (at $157 billion it comes in at more than 6 times the cost of the #2 object, the Itaipu Dam).
That being said, if we can manage to get a cheap method of reacting orbit, the primary barrier would be circumvented and it would make all kinds of sense to migrate such things to orbit. As the OP suggested, energy is abundant (both from solar sources and from various theoretical designs of orbital tethers tapping electrostatic energy in the atmosphere or electrodynamic magnetic harvesting. At that point the Zero-G environment would make large scale industrial and manufacturing endeavors much easier, especially if you can accept the idea that by that time the bulk of the raw materials would be harvested from non-terrestrial sources like asteroids, comets, and meteoroids.
Currently the most promising concept on tap seems to be the Orbital Space Elevator. We have basically all the fundamental technologies required with the advent of Carbon Nanotubes (as opposed to more theoretical solutions involving gravity manipulation, for example). It has come down largely to a manufacturing challenge of creating the 22 mile cable required, when currently nothing longer than about one meter has been achieved.
Common Sense isn't as Common as people think...
Earth has become a very small and limited place. Space is full of raw materials and energy, limitless amounts of them. It's definitely the new frontier and going to other places when the place they were was used up and overpopulated is exactly what people did since millions of years and what caused our species to spread over all the planet. Everyone who thinks that we will be limited to this rock just has no idea.
Look at this if you have a few minutes: http://www.bradshawfoundation....
And yet there are large tracts of the planet which are not uninhabitable and yet have very low population densities. There is plenty of land, plenty of potentially arable land, plenty of fresh water. Yet it isn't used because the distribution of humans on planet Earth is extremely uneven and concentrated into pockets. So, looking at these densely populated locations with their food supply and fresh water problems you can get the mistaken impression that we are overpopulating the planet.
"First, assume a spherical cow".
I think the current distribution of people on the planet has lots to do with where people want to live. Admittedly there is lots of historical accident and inertia in there (only in the last 100 years has it been feasible for any significant population to live at a significant distance from food sources for instance). But to assume that Northern Canada or Central Australia are going to be as desirable as San Diego of the Mediterranean seems like a big stretch.
The problem is that's is very difficult to freeze population to a constant level (see China). You might be able to freeze the head count but run the risk of severly skewing your age pyramid, which can lead to massive problems a generation later. Moreover, birth control isn't popular in the free world, you'd be limiting an essential human freedom (and the purpose of life).
The danger is declining population.
You don't actually want declining population:
1) Most pension schemes rely on at least constant population. Smarter pension schemes rely on economic growth (which is possible with slightly declining population), but not all countries have them implemented.
2) Declining population can also trigger massive problems with economy: You'll have to divest in a controlled and smart way. Example: real estate values are likely to drop if head count goes down. See former East German towns: some of them have become almost ghost towns, many with only retirees living there. This triggers business closings, which in turn makes young people move away. A self enforcing negative trend.
More population is no problem. There's lots of space on earth. If it becomes too crowded people will move to Mars or space. In fact, that could become a driving force, eventually.
I was about to come here to disagree with Bezos, partly about his arguing with the caricature of Musk's position strawmanned by the press. ...but you all have a huge misconception that must be addressed:
1) Getting to space need not be ridiculously expensive, and no, I'm not talking about a tether.
Reusable rockets running on methane (or hydrogen) and oxygen can be quite efficient. Natural gas happens to be the cheapest form of energy on the planet right now, but we can also synthesize it using electricity. And rockets are actually much more efficient than we give them credit for. It principle, with reusable rockets (and perhaps launch assist for the initial portion), we can get the price to orbit down to $10/kg. Perhaps about the same as the cost to fly around the world. We may not get there for a while, but there IS NO PHYSICAL REASON why cost can't get this low. This seems outrageous now because we throw the whole rocket away each time and so it appears unyieldingly expensive at 3 orders of magnitude higher ($10,000/kg), but Bezos' whole business in spaceflight is to pursue this reusable technology. Mastering reuse (which includes using appropriate materials for the conditions in question and developing appropriate automation) really could reduce cost that much.
2) You can get iron-nickel alloys in space that are already pre-refined.
3) Putting a Gigawatt solar array in space /someday/(when prices are lower) is not insane, even if it is today. The energy it generates will exceed the energy needed to launch it in a few days or weeks if properly designed.
I actually disagree with Bezos to some extent. But let's have the conversion start with some facts.
...because all the materials to be sent out into space will be shipped via Amazon Prime. So you know, just $99 a year.
None of these are insurmountable problems. On the other hand, supporting an ever-growing population is an insurmountable problem. The economy needs to be reshaped to fit the future society.
By the time you ship a batch of processors from Mars, it will be outdated by the time it gets to Earth :-)
No need to ship the processors from Mars to Earth!
The thing with Mars is its cold, so its an ideal place for data centers
Yea but man, those ping times....
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
Translation: We broke Earth, so let's move on to screw up the rest of the universe.
Table-ized A.I.
Actually population growth freezes itself when you educate people. Look at Japan. Low immigration and low birthrate has lead to population decline.
Education is not the reason why Japan is experiencing a population growth freeze. Japanese means of production are incredibly female-unfriendly (I've been in Japan, I've seen it.) A woman gets the choice of either work or have babies. There is little infrastructure or services for affordable child care. Even with maternity leave, the system makes it impossible and costly for a married woman to go back to work.
This is very unlike other developed countries.
And what you seen then is that pretty much half of the work force in on the bench, with families supported by one source of income. Since child care is so expensive, the end result was inevitable: marry later, and wait into your late 30s to have one child (because, even though the majority of couples want to have two, they truly cannot afford to do so.)
This wasn't like that before. In the 60's and 70's, it was easy for a married woman to get a part-time job at a factory, and the cost of raising a child wasn't as much. But that is no longer true.
Education is not the reason (or at the very least one of the primary ones) for the population implosion. That is just a cultural projection being made. That is all.
Do you have any idea on how much of a hubristic idiot one must be to even consider the possibility that one is able to predict the future this far ahead ?
He is not predicting. He is laying out a proposed plan and he wants to be part of the first building blocks. Whether the final product occurs in the next few centuries is not so much relevant as having a long-term investment plan for the next 2-3 decades under the assumption of continuous technological progress.
People like him have the means and ambitions to pursue it. If they fail, they fail. If they succeed, they succeed. The rest of us can simply play armchair coaches without any sort of ambition.
2) Declining population can also trigger massive problems with economy: You'll have to divest in a controlled and smart way. Example: real estate values are likely to drop if head count goes down. See former East German towns: some of them have become almost ghost towns, many with only retirees living there. This triggers business closings, which in turn makes young people move away. A self enforcing negative trend.
It's not just Germany; the USA is filled with small towns like this, all over the place. The population here is urbanizing, so all the young people are moving to cities. The big cities are growing bigger, as are the medium-sized ones. The towns are all shrinking and dying, and are full of people who never left and are now retired.
and pollute the current globe even more by bringing the equipment up and down.
Total fantasy, not sure what the guy is smoking, sure want nothing from it!
Maybe he is loosing it...
And yet there are large tracts of the planet which are not uninhabitable and yet have very low population densities. There is plenty of land, plenty of potentially arable land, plenty of fresh water.
Like where? There's plenty of land in northern Canada and Alaska, but it's frozen tundra, and definitely not arable. There's plenty of land in the Sahara desert; I don't think I need to explain the problem there. There's plenty of land in North Dakota, but who wants to live where it's -40 in the winter?
The reason the population is uneven and "concentrated into pockets" is because people generally like to live places where the weather is mild (not too hot, not too cold), and where there's enough freshwater (becoming a big problem in the American southwest). They also tend to like to live on coasts. Part of this is because we naturally like water, but there's a good reason for it too: the weather is better. There's a reason places like Kansas are known as "Tornado Alley": the entire middle section of the country has very extreme weather that you don't find on the coasts, either extreme heat (TX), tornados, or extreme cold.(MN, ND).
Maybe if we started building cities which were more insulated from the environment (such as the domed cities seen in sci-fi), then more of these places would be habitable. -40 in the winter isn't so bad when the summer is nice and mild, and you can just stay inside your domed city in the winter. But we're nowhere near that point yet, so unless you really like living someplace where the oil in your car's engine literally freezes overnight, you probably want to live in one of the mild climate locations, which is why all those places are crowded.
We *are* overpopulating the planet, with the way we're living now. It doesn't have to be this way. We could move our heavy industry into space like Bezos suggests, do most of our mining in the asteroids and on the Moon, and then work on making our cities more livable. Get rid of cars, and instead have good subway systems and SkyTran for getting people around quickly and cheaply. We waste a massive amount of land in our cities to cars and all the infrastructure to support them (roads, garages, parking lots). We also build our buildings much too small: build a city that's basically one giant cubic building, 200 stories high, and you could house an incredible number of people in a rather small space. If you want everyone to have their own 1/2-acre yard and separate house for 1-2 people plus 1-2 kids, and a garage and a car for driving everywhere, and you want the housing districts located far from workplaces, then yes, we are absolutely overpopulated.
I can see a serious problem when something goes wrong and a little factory explosion occurs. Next up, the bits and pieces from the accident litter up the area and starts a chain reaction of destruction of anything in orbit. Already there are problems with avoiding old junk.
It seems that the number one issue rich people with lots of money want to solve as they get older is population growth. It's kind of disturbing. That's why Elon Musk is such a breath of fresh air. He actually wants to do something to save the human race that doesn't involve negative population growth.
the trick is you
1 send robots to setup the core base (work domes and such)
2 when the core base is stable (viable atmo for X months) send oh convicts up to start expanding the base
3 then send normal blue collar folks ( Zero workers killed for X Months) to expand things and get Families up
4 then the execs get sent up (and the "Entertainment" type folks)
Can we start with the entire Washington Post operation? No space suits either...
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
Firstly to get those asteroid, assuming we do not wait for a NEO, we'll need a lot of energy to go get one in the outer system or possibly at some supposed to be at the lagrange points.The other possibility is to wait for one coming by and delta-v it into a stable orbit. The last one which does not allow you to chose, you have to catch what's passing by. That was the easiest part. Now you gotta mine it, and we have for all practical purpose no experience in it. It isn't as easy as scooping it even for asteroid thought to be a collection of lose rocks : remember newton's law , they don't disturb mining on earth but on an asteroid it is something else, you mining stuff need to be anchored and what it mines needs to get caught. Not the biggest obstacle but it is another one. And then there is the problem that it is not easy to have people living up (look at all the health problem we have with LEO astronaut), so it means automation a LOT of it, and possibly wait for days or weeks if something break. Finally while it is true there are a lot of CHON, we still need to process it which means energy and even solar panel need replacements.
What i am saying is : while it is on the technical horizon , barring stark penury on earth, there is no incentive to all the cost associated with mining in space. Maybe in 100 years when global warming seriously starts eroding our coast, and maybe if energy gets harder to get (oil/coal) and some raw material harder to get e.g. copper, maybe it gets expansive enough to start thinking about it. In all seriousness I am betting on never , e.g. by the time we need it we don't have anymore the energy or technical capability or opportunity of doing it ever.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
"Is the surface of a planet really the right place for an expanding technological civilization?" -- O'Neill, 1969
Earliest source of this quote is widely claimed to be an interview by Stewart Brand in 1975. His (O'Neill's) paper on space colonization appeared in Physics Today in 1974. The original question seems to have been raised (in 1969) by O'Neill in a freshman physics course he taught at Princeton.
The students decided on the answer "no".
-- Alastair
A fair point, but realize that even within China, Africa and India there is huge variation in population density, and some of that is purely due to individuals expressing a preference for where they want to live. They may wish they lived in the Greek Isles, but having a choice between a rural village with no electricity and no running water, or a shanty in Mumbai, they may still choose Mumbai.
Where do you find the iron ore to melt? There's very little material in space near Earth.
From I understand the asteroid belt is quite far away in comparison to the moon. There are many logistical and fuel considerations to get to asteroid X, install something on it, mine or move it. Even if we do (from what other's have said) we might be able to make heavy raw materials but that's still just one step in a long journey.
LEO is an option but look how long it takes us to build IIS and its non-capacity for volume production or habitation. Also isn't there heaps of junk in LEO at the moment that is hazardous to space craft?
I am curious why the moon is not the first choice
Think of it like building a camping hut. Bit by bit materials are sent by unmanned vehicles. The only have to go one way so the fuel requirement is less (and they can form part of the construction material). Like the IIS it doesn't matter who sends or makes them as long as there is an open/coordinated design so they can be assembled or collectively utilised.
A problem with asteroid mining is that there is nothing there by the time we arrive. Surely by installing a power grind and robotically build habitations prior to going up there we would gain vastly more knowledge about creating colonies off Earth? "In an ideal world" we would create a monitored habitable farm on the moon with proven practices & stored farm produce long before we step into our new home.