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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.
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.
Or do math. A Dyson Sphere at one AU has an interior surface area of 2.8e17 km^2. A population of a trillion would mean an area the size of Montana for every individual. That's ridiculous. Nobody needs that much space.
The solar system could easily support a quadrillion people, or even a quintillion.
Dyson Spheres don't actually make sense, though. Dyson Swarms do work, can be built incrementally, and give similar living room.
The population of a Kardashev Type 2 civilization is mind-boggling. We may not have found one, but if there is one they've found us - a civilization that large could have a million astronomers per potentially inhabited world in the galaxy, without astronomers being more common per capita than today. They could also build a telescope large enough to see the cities light up the night side of Earth.
We humans don't seem to be doing much in increase our population,though - most industrialized nations now have negative population growth before immigration. Perhaps it's the lack of frontiers?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
But we are not all heads of massive corperations. And we all can't have legions of people behind us pushing us into the stars. And the further we get away from Earth, the harder it will get, up until we can make jt to a other island eathlike planet.
Robots. We can all have legions of robots. Any long-term off-Earth habitation beyond ISS scale would require robotic asteroid mining to be practical, but the whole system opens up to us once we're doing that. Unlimited fuel and building materials in high orbit changes everything.
Mostly-autonomous robotic mining (and simple heavy industry) no longer sounds far-fetched. Would it surprise anyone here if all the mining jobs were lost to robots in the next 20 years?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The difference is that Elon Musk has a company that actually has put something into orbit, so he at least has the ability to talk.
Blue Origin has yet to even make one orbital flight, at all.
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