Slashdot Mirror
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
That's "alluded" not "eluded" https://www.diffen.com/difference/Allude_vs_Elude/ but anyway, the idea goes back at least as far as Olaf Stapledon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere
Elon Musk: weâ(TM)ll send humans to mars in 2024.
Jeff Bezos: Hold my beer...
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+
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.
Jeff needs to stop thinking small.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 solar system, in theory, can easily support 1 trillion humans. In fact with the resources of asteroids, moons, and Oort cloud I imagine the solar system could support many times that.
Your first mistake is assuming they would all live here on earth. I don't even believe there is a enough physical space to hold 1 trillion humans. Your second mistake seems to be that we will be doing with with today's technology. Which we won't.
There is enough space and resources out there, and given time it could happen. Does that mean it will? Not a chance.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
Humans are a collective unto themselves. They comprise billions of cells per human. An exponentiation of humanity and their cells sounds like an interesting idea until you look at the very narrow ambient conditions that humans can tolerate without dismay or death.
Jeff just wants to keep selling selling selling, and the more customers the merrier, so please continue having sex, and none of that birth control, abortion, or homo stuff, please. Jeff needs more Amazon customers, and clearly, the solar system won't be enough.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Here's the thing though, every damn thing requires power to do and maintain.
No problem. We will just build the Dyson Sphere around a 100 yotta-watt fusion generator.
If we have a quintillion people, that is 100 megawatts per person.
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.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
What part of "in theory" do you not understand?
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.