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Jeff Bezos Predicts We'll Have 1 Trillion Humans in the Solar System, and Blue Origin Wants To Help Get Us There (cnbc.com)
Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos predicted Monday that we'll have one trillion humans in the solar system one day -- and he showed off how the rocket company plans to help get there. "I won't be alive to see the fulfillment of that long term mission," Bezos said at the Wired 25th anniversary summit in San Francisco. "We are starting to bump up against the absolute true fact that Earth is finite." From a report: Blue Origin's aim is to lower the cost of access to space, Bezos said. Elon Musk's SpaceX and Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic are also eyeing commercial space travel. "The dynamism that I have seen over the last 20 years in the internet where incredible things have happened in really short periods of time," Bezos said. "We need thousands of companies. We need the same dynamism in space that we've seen online over the last 20 years. And we can do that." Further reading: Jeff Bezos Wants Us All to Leave Earth -- for Good.
How many sci fi authors have eluded to this before Jeff Bezos?
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Less talking. You're not helping.
Getting sick of these sociopathic Big Tech billionaires trying to "space-wash" their unfettered greed with sci-fi fantasies of "taking humanity to live in AI machines on Mars"
This fucking cunt could end world hunger with his pocket change today, but wont.
He is not the savior of the human race.
Neither is Elon Musk. Neither is Richard Branson. Neither is Mark Zuckerberg.
Learn to spot a confidence job.
We have enough problems supporting almost 8 billion people on the earth. This idiot wants to just keep going to 100 times that?
Only a megalomaniac like Bezos who built a company that seeks to take over all retail could say something like that with a straight face.
Look, the planet will peak out at about 9.5m people, and within the lifetime of most people posting here today (2050ish). Lucky if we don't all follow the Japanese (ever more elderly, ever more conservatively decaying).
Since the invention of even halfway functional birth control, no civilization capable of anything as high-tech as space travel has had a fertility rate above replacement, and it's not about to start now. Even the 'developing world'... China is WAY below replacement even with the end of the one-child policy. Most of southern (i.e., reasonably functional) India is below 2. Brazil, Mexico, Turkey, Bangladesh. All below 2.
There's some demographic overhang (more teens and 20-something, so some growth even if their fertility is down), but countries who could actually contribute to 12x-ing the population are Nigerians, Congolese, Afghanis, Filpinos, and Guatemalans. That's. It.
If they wanted to. Would they need a military to get the food to the people. (african warlords). Have they given it much thought, if so what was their conclusion, its a good question for them.
[($)]
We're long overdue for a pandemic to keep the population in check. It's been a hundred years since the flu killed 50M to 100M people, and over 600 years since the black plague pandemic killed 75M to .200M people. Climate change might do a better job than a pandemic.
...ship (cargo, people, something). The rest just talk about it.
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
"I won't be alive to see the fulfillment of that long term mission". So lets dump the money into becoming immortal first then we can worry about everything else since we will have more time... Why don't extremely wealthy people work on living forever ? Very weird..
Anything you have put in orbit. How about beyond Earth Orbit?
Can you imagine the resulting mess if even a fraction of those people went to Chipotle Galactica and had lunch? Stay away from the space lettuce! Now with pan-spermic E. coli!
Elon Musk: weâ(TM)ll send humans to mars in 2024.
Jeff Bezos: Hold my beer...
I for one would not like to live my entire live in some metal container in space or on a inhospitable planet or moon. And that is where 99% of humanity will have to live.
Earth will probably become a planet sized Beverly Hills, for the happy few only. Until the first disenfranchised group starts their bombardment from the asteroid belt that is.
Not for many millennia. Even if we colonise the moons and the planets and the asteroids. No planet is going to be able to support as many as Earth for millennia- and population growth is slowing on earth due to resource costs of raising children here. When we hit 1 trillion we will be a multi-system race. We may never hit 1 trillion within our solar system because there really isn't enough resources here to justify that many people.
There may be 1 trillion living humans oneday but I doubt it will all be in our solar system- not for millennia at least.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
How about we work with what we've already got beneath our feet before we go trampling over the rest of it?
Takes a fat glass of ignorance for anyone on this planet right now to say that we are not affecting the planet's systems by being here and doing what we are doing.
Everything that ever happens has a fucking effect on everything else and people ought to sooner than later quit with the narcissistic need to be right and realize these SIMPLE FUCKING TRUTHS.
Like I've said in other posts, Earth is self-regulating. We are not some blemish on the planet, not innately. It's fucking ludicrous from a cosmic perspective to think that we are some pest to the planet. It's our unchecked alteration of its physical systems ON TOP OF the planet's natural regulatory cycles, which indude the measure of climate change that will be no longer deniable in the near future.
Feedback systems. It's not fucking rocket science you fucking bigots. But it IS fucking SCIENCE. "SCIENCE, BITCH."
Also science: the sun will someday explode, and this solar system will be no more, not as we know it.
But that's not on the radar right now. We have millions upon millions of years until that happens.
Half eaten bread. That's how wastefully these narcissistic space-billionare fucks look at this planet.
Warm it up (the bread, not the planet, pun intended) and fucking eat it you ignorant motherfuckers.
Love you too.
p.s.
If you're not aware that we are already in space, and exploring far far FAR more of our solar system than the public relations branch of NASA gets to talk to us about, why don't you read a little bit about superconductivity, toroidal magnetic field dynamics, or just go back to high school and take your fucking physics class again.
No pun intended here but IT IS *NOT* FUCKING ROCKET SCIENCE.
OPEN YOUR GOD DAMNED FUCKING EYES
so many ruined planets. one day some aliens are going to develop a pesticide just to deal with humans.
no wonder that looks appealing to him
I keep asking that question. Setting up colonies and supporting them will take a large amount of energy. Is there enough energy available on Earth to sustain this? Even with solar and wind. Remember all rocket fuel we have now is petroleum based. Would the energy required leave the planet a raped burnt out husk?
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
We ideally should have at most 1-2 billion on Earth, which equates to 10 billion in the solar system.
And that requires preventing all resources being drained by excessive copies of any given mutation.
Since we cannot know future needs, we cannot say anything is useless other than excess.
As for living in Mars, that's easy. We know how to live on Mars. Deep underground. Been known for years. Only idiots talk about surface dwellings. There's nothing interesting on the surface, just a lot of radiation and toxins.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
He could pay his people a living wage. Which could then drive space tourism and create the market conditions needed for long term space development.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
So who is going to colonize space first? The wealthy or the poor? History points to the answer: prisoners, ex-cons, dissidents, etc. Once the environment is stabilized and tamed, then the wealthy will buy into it, and the poor will have to scatter further away.
Elon Musk must have a deal arranged before he can say publicly "thinking about taking Tesla private." Then Bezos should have a contract signed and ready to take 1 trillion humans to space to avoid SEC fines. Both statements didn't give a real timeframe or specific date. What if I buy a bunch of stock because surely trillions of people will be using this service? Would someone please think of the shorts here!
We need you to save the planet. Just step aboard and you'll be one of the lucky few!
Will be like The Expanse, where politics and greed are the same, just with better technology and larger scales, or like Star Trek, a post-scarcity meritocracy where replicators can make anything you want and internal strife is rare?
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=how+to+prepare+humans+twilight+zone
My opinion: Jeff Bezos is not a sufficiently capable manager. Evidence: Look at any Amazon web page. As you are researching some product that is interesting, you are often distracted by other products. One fix: Put any distractions at the bottom of the page.
There are many other shortcomings of the Amazon web site.
Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace (New York Times, Aug. 15, 2015)
Quote: "The company is conducting an experiment in how far it can push white-collar workers..."
Amazon warehouse jobs push workers to physical limit (Seattle Times, April 3, 2012)
Worse than Wal-Mart: Amazon's sick brutality and secret history of ruthlessly intimidating workers (Salon.com, Feb. 23, 2014)
Amazon paid no US income taxes for 2017 (SeattlePI, Feb. 27, 2018)
Undercover author finds Amazon warehouse workers in UK 'peed in bottles' over fears of being punished for taking a break (Business Insider, April 16, 2018)
The undercover author who discovered Amazon warehouse workers were peeing in bottles tells us the culture was like a 'prison' (Business Insider, April 18, 2018)
Amazon Gets Tax Breaks While Its Employees Rely on Food Stamps, New Data Shows (The Intercept, April 19, 2018)
Quote: "Though the company now employs 200,000 people in the United States, many of its workers are not making enough money to put food on the table."
Amazon Under Fire Over Alleged Worker Abuse in Germany (bloomberg.com, Feb 19, 2013)
Would you fly into space with a company managed by someone who makes those mistakes and doesn't detect them? Note that Blue Origins does not have the capability of orbiting the earth.
I wonder if he confused Solar system with Milky way..There is clearly no way 1 trillion humans could inhabit the Solar system, since I believe most of those would live on Earth. Are we able to terraform all solar system yet?
than exists currently on Earth. What we need is robotic gatherers, robotic smelters, etc that can get the resources and store them for us when we are ready to move off this rock.
Other planets and moons are just gravity wells that future inhabitants will need to climb out of. We need to learn to survive in space. If we do that, we have a shot at long term survival. Otherwise, we are just waiting for the next extinction level impact.
Have you ever noticed that people who have no clue what the fuck they are talking about often speak the loudest? Jeff Bezos and his gobs of pilfered cash speak awfully loudly, and someone tell me what he knows besides how to exploit a nascent technological niche and lack of taxes to leverage a slight edge, and how lacking scruples facilitates amassing the largest personal fortune in human history? (If those tax loopholes did not exist, Amazon would be a quaint little online bookseller today, and nothing more.)
Bezos must know of some other Earthlike planet in our solar system that can somehow support over 100 times the cureent human population of planet Earth, and is simply refusing to share news of the discovery with the rest of humanity.
This reminds me of what Bill Maher said about Matt Damon and his shit-potatoes, (in that movie about some poor schmuck getting stuck on Mars or whatever, that was not worth my time to watch because the premise is fucking stupid so hence I did not watch it).
First, it takes a fuck of a lot more than the equivalent of 2000 calories per day per person to sustain people. The average, 2000 calories/day generally quoted, assumes a consistently sedentary life, meaning no manual labor of any kind, and no working-out to get in or stay in shape, physically. Say hello to muscle atrophy and bone wasting, and all the attendant health and mental problems THAT causes. According to Dr. Thomas Malthus, (as I recollect his famous Rule of 10,) it takes about 10 times the mass of each kind of food, on average, to produce that much mass of an organism. So for a human who eats fish that eat smaller fish or bugs, that inturn feed on bugs, plankton, aquatic plants, etc., that energy came from the sun, originally. For each resulting pound of human, the requirement is 10 pounds of fish, and for each pound of fish there must be 10 pounds of either smaller fish, or bugs, or whatever. For each pound of that, there must be about 10 pounds, (and of course these are all approximations,) 10 pounds of something photosynthetic, i.e. plant-matter. So until we can master synthetic photo-meat-ogenesis, each pound of human grown off-world will require between 1,000 and 10,000 pounds of plant-matter grown, devoted solely to raising food that goes into a human gut. The rules are similar for any other kind of meat, even if the chain of custody for the energy is shorter in terms of number of links, i.e., blades of grass photosynthesize light into cellulose fibers, etc, cattle eat the grass, and become delicious steaks, the energy expended to live per unit mass seems to climb steadily once a being gets to be much larger than the minimum required volume to be what we think of as macroscopic. So unless these trillion humans are all vegans, (which only reduces the bare-ass-minimum amount of energy required by a single order of magnitude, down to MERELY INCONCEIVABLE, from the higher value of FUCKING INCONCEIVABLE!) which obliges us to consider the question, how much extra energy must a vegan consume or expend as a penalty for eschewing a whole vast category of foods we have evolved to need, some of them are going to have to subsist on the very next animal up the food chain from grass, i.e., bugs, or resort to an extreme form of recycling called, cannibalism. More Soylent Green, anyone?
Second, what precisely the fuck is the point of even as many humans as we have? I am not advocating for murdering people because I arbitrarily think there are too many humans, or even telling people they cannot reproduce anymore... but why would you WISH, on purpose, to HAVE that many? Does Bezos long for the day when he could be, and weep bitterly over the thought that he may never realize his dream of being... a quadrillionaire? A quintillionaire? How the fuck much money is enough, and can such hoarding behavior be deemed a form of mental illness? Maybe it is not his fault. Maybe he is sick... though the hiring ambulances to take people to the hospital when they collapse from heatstroke rather than shel
Our reign has gone on long enough. Indeed. Summon the meteors.
Even more annoying assholes I have to deal with.
http://progressquest.com/spoltog.php?name=Son+Of+Son+Of+DarkRookie
People, stop wasting your time with rockets. They're dangerous, delicate, prone to failure, inefficient, obscenely expensive, and just waiting to explode.
I don't think it would be even theoretically possible to house 1 trillon, not even 10 billion humans in the entire solar system even with advanced technology. 10 billion is the projected population of Earth within a human lifespan from now.
First, this planet we are living on, which is the best suited for human survival is already a couple times overpopulated with humans. We are in the beginning of an ecosystem collapse right now because of how many of us there are.
Earth has some unique conditions in the solar system. It's location protects it from incoming meteors and comets: most being absorbed by the outer planets and the asteroid fields. It is at a nice distance from the sun. It is geologically stable, with both land and water. A magnetic field prevents the atmosphere from being blown away by solar wind, and the atmosphere and magnetic field protects its inhabitants from radiation.
These together have made living conditions very stable compared to other bodies.
Among the other bodies in the solar system, there is only one that is even remotely suitable for advanced human habitation in the long term: Mars. Mars has only the location going for it: being inside the asteroid field. That's it. People would have to live underground or in domed cities. With a surface area a quarter of Earth's, it should go without saying that you won't be able to fit 9'996 billion people there.
Note also that a lot of that space would be needed for biosystem services, like on Earth: the oceans and plantlife provide the oxygen needed for breathing.
But first, we would have to survive the current crisis to even start thinking of colonising other planets.
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
It's not about "justification". It's about, what does humanity want, what do individual humans want, and what resources are available.
I suspect that the human race will expand as long as the resources permit that, and localized cases will expand beyond resource availability. The same way it has always been.
We both have forebrains and primitive brainstems. Our nature involves perpetual contention and resolution between the two. We are neither always rational nor always irrational.
sold to you by those who would destroy you.
What is Winter Sunlight?
IPFS
So, Earth is finite. Good to know. Alas, the bottleneck isn't the finite land, it's the finite materials -- water, food, air.
Mars has exactly zero water, food, and air.
It'll be, oh, about two hundred years before we can support a million humans outside of earth. and when I say "can", what I actually mean is "choose to".
A trillion people huh? How many of those are christian children fund starving children in africa? If we're shipping them to neptune, will we also ship some horseflies to land on their faces for the commercials?
My point is simply that we don't care about things that happen far away. This proposes multiplying that distance by about a million. Exactly how much of my unisef dollar is going to make it to neptune's starving children?
So, let's talk about desire.
Six hundred years ago. It was a time of plagues and pestilence and very bland english food. So bland, in fact, that they roamed far and wide to explore and to find flavourful food. They eventually found india and indian spices, and traveled months in each direction. It was worth it.
It was so worthwhile that people thought they'd find a shorter route by literally sailing off the edge of the world.
Now tell me, how many people actually tried to find the americas? How many people didn't give a shit. How long did it take before enough people tried that any succeeded at all? How long until there were enough to populate a small town?
Now how many would be required to populate a small town given no air, no water, and no food to start.
Enjoy.
We're at just about 7 billion, and we can't even get along, and we're nowhere near having permanent colonies anywhere else in our own planetary system -- nor are we even close to 100% sure that we can safely exist in colonies off Earth for entire lifetimes, let alone reproduce successfully there, and still be healthy. Aside from the technical challenges there's also vast uncertainty as to whether or not we've sabotaged our own ecosphere to the point where we can't depend on being able to live in it for the long term (meaning: at least the next 1000 years). In the meantime we still wage war against our own kind, and that's just going to get worse as resouces and land you can live on becomes more scare, and wars are huge wasters of resources as well as lives. People like this Jeff Bezos don't seem to be living in reality, he's got some high-minded ideas that are more science fiction than they are science fact, and that seem to ignore the human part of the equation. Even if what he says becomes reality, our entire socio-political paradigm will have to drastically change in order for 1 trillion humans to all get along and reach any sort of consensus on anything, even if they're not living on the same planet. Unless there is a dramatic leap forward in our own evolution as a species I can see us waging war in our own solar system -- can you say 'bombard from orbit'? Would make nuclear weapons seem like amateur night by comparison. My recommendation to Mister Bezos? Let's work on not wrecking the Earth, and also not wrecking ourselves, as a species, then maybe we can think about colonizing our solar system. Horse before the cart, please.
...ever born is still in the Solar System with no help at all from Jeff Bezos. Someday that number will total 1 Trillion, unless we wipe ourselves out first.
Jeff Bezos predicted Monday thatÂwe'll have one trillion humans in the solar system one day
Unless things change a lot at some point, I don't see how that's going to happen. It's going to take a lot of tech advances if we going to somehow populate anything besides our current planet. It's becoming apparent that after a society reaches a certain level of advancement the population plateaus or even shrinks. Just look at Japan.
If this is in fact the case, then in order to keep growing the population, we're going to need a good size portion to not reach that point. In which case we're going to have a lot of fighting between different classes, races, tribes, and whatnot. Hell, just look at how the different political parties are with each other in the US right now. Unless something happens to change the curent trajectory, things are not going to get better
Then, if we somehow manage to actually populate somewhere else, how long will it take before the population of the moon, Mars, or whatever feel they are being treated unfairly by Earth? I would guess that once the population becomes self sufficient, or has a product that only they can supply they will want independance. That seems to be the way of things here on earth. At least historically. If that turns into a war, then someone could start lobbing rocks from above,. Which won't turn out well.
But all of that is moot until we over come all of the technical hurdles. Which are not going to be easy in any way. Getting enough mass out of the earth's gravity well is going to be expensive. We could probably do that currently if there was enough public support. But needing to carry all of the stuff needed to survive is costly and no easy task. Surviving radiation once we leave the protection of earth's magnitosphere is also something we don't know how to do in a practical manner. If we manage all of that, we still need a way to keep a perpetual life support system going at the destination. Long term, it's likely that no one will ever be able to return to earth either. Anyone born on one of these colonies will not develop to do well in earth's environment.
I like science fiction as much as would be expected for someone on /. but we're not going to be leaving the planet to settle somewhere else any time soon. Not without some huge leaps in our technology. It'smore likely that we turn into a planet of Borg like lifeforms in order to grow our population to a trillion than we do so by colonizing other planets and moons.
Humans will leave the earth, but not into space, rather by going extinct. And the ET's who are keeping the planet under quarantine won't be allowing any humans go anywhere else to destroy other worlds like they did their own.
No, not really.
99% of the concern is that we might not be able to live in the current numbers and at the current burn rate. A plague that kills 3 billion people would set human progress back by about 50 years. Meanwhile there would be a great flourishing of all the other life taking advantage of all those resources we were no longer consuming.
We complain about pollution, but all anthropic pollution added together harms human health less than long-prevailing childbirth and infant mortality rates (survival to age six).
The Disturbing, Shameful History of Childbirth Deaths — 10 September 2013
That's at the current, miraculously improved death rate.
United States in 1900: 850 per 100,000 live births. These are young, healthy women dying, not women aged 55 who inhaled too many fumes of some modern industrial varnish.
Short of tipping the whole planet into nuclear winter, we haven't done any damage to the planetary ecosystem that a great human dying off wouldn't put right in under a few centuries.
So what if the ice caps melt? It's happened before, and life survived just fine. Might be tragic for fancy apes with beach homes. But let's not imagine any whales are going to complain.
Historically when 1/3 or 2/3 of the population dies off suddenly, it's not a happy time for anyone who lives through it. We've have to discard a heap-load of useless modern technology, such as Twitter. But we'd keep the essentials running, such as a circa 2005-level Google search —though maybe with a 2000 ms response time instead of 400 ms (and maybe only 25% of the population would have direct access). It would be tough, but we'd all pull together (those of us who were still living) and we'd pull through.
Even if the entire planet died back to a stable population at the levels of the Roman Empire (circa 100 million people), humans would not loose their cherished conservation status: Least Concern.
Endangered species criteria (one of many):
* Population estimated to number fewer than 2,500 mature individuals.
* Total human breeding population of 2,500 individuals (in sufficiently close proximity) around Moan Level 8 (where 9.99 is one bun in the oven away from species-level exit stage left).
* Total human breeding population of 100 million individuals (in sufficiently close proximity) around Moan Level 3. (And that might be generous.)
* Everything below 3.0 is denominated in millimoans.
* Our biggest ongoing tragedies: about 100 millimoans each (the great plastic gyre, a few degrees C global temperature rise, things like that).
* A really severe global nuclear winter: maybe 3,000 millimoans. (In my system above, that's a 98.6% global human population loss.)
Perspective. It's a bitch.
This is an utterly INSANE remark. We have so many problems just trying to support a few billion with constant concerns over resource depletion and habitat destruction. An energy crisis and this is with oil, carbon reserves etc. No oil, no coal on mars. Where is all of vast amounts of energy going toi come from for what is a much much higher energy survival coast for being able to survive on mars or in these hostile foreign worlds, where you need vast energy supplies just to be able to breath? These insane ideas and remarks actually threaten to make our situation worse by stressing already finite resources on these crazy schemes.
Even Bezos doesn't need that many slaves.
Oh, you thought the oligarchs were going to control the resources of the entire solar system for all our benefit? What, are you stupid?
re
We're talking about humans here, so ... The Expanse.
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
A Trillion humans by Monday? Thats really quick, I better get started.
... insects are dying off.
He's mistaking his ego growth for population growth.
Table-ized A.I.
Don't worry, Chris: they make inflatable goats too! You don't have to force yourself to get excited over human females anymore!
There would not only set an automatic limit on the expansion of the population, but it would [...] actually reduce the incidence of rioting as time went on.
There are frustrated people right now who want children but have trouble procreating. Now you tell them that government technocrats are keeping them from raising children... and you expect fewer riots?
Not only that, you'd materialize a market for stolen babies. After the pool of adoptable children dried up (which is great!), desperate would-be parents will look elsewhere.
Your grand vision is interesting, but the social costs are too high. Write it up as a sci-fi short.
Maybe millennia was Bezos' timeframe though. Maybe he was thinking in terms of, what is the maximum carrying capacity of the solar system? How many ecological and geological niches can humanity occupy?