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Space

Jeff Bezos Predicts We'll Have 1 Trillion Humans in the Solar System, and Blue Origin Wants To Help Get Us There (cnbc.com) 184

Posted by msmash from the in-the-distant-future dept.
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.
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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 More

Jeff Bezos Predicts We'll Have 1 Trillion Humans in the Solar System, and Blue Origin Wants To Help Get Us There

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  • Boring (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    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.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Ending world hunger will make you feel good in the short term, but in the medium and long term you would realize it was a short-sighted idealistic dream.

      End world hunger today and people will start reproducing en masse again.

      If people start reproducing en masse again, you're only postponing world hunger for a few years or decades at the most. You also put more pressure on the planet for all other ressources: water, trash, occupied land, goods manufacturing, etc.

      The Earth is a closed system with finite resso

      • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

        by 110010001000 ( 697113 )
        Ending world hunger includes educating people. This will reduce reproduction. The idea that hungry people won't reproduce is silly. Just look around. He OP is right: the megalomaniac Internet "moguls" need to focus on Earth, not outer space. No one is living anywhere else but on Earth. We can't: we evolved to live here and our entire physiology depends on it.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Sperbels ( 1008585 )
          Education doesn't reduce population. Offering birth control to women is extremely effective...but you must control all the governments to make this possible...and not a lot of people are on board with this idea anyway. Bringing everyone up to the decadent standards of living we have in the west helps too...unfortunately the planet simply can't sustain that many people living that wastefully. Honestly, we're probably just headed more warfare and famine regardless of what we do. And transplanting vast num
      • Population growth actually shrinks when you have a stable standard of living and certain basic rights and amenities. That's why Europe, America, and Japan have either replacement of sub-replacement birth rates.

    • Re:Boring (Score:5, Funny)

      by lgw ( 121541 ) on Monday October 15, 2018 @04:24PM (#57482318) Journal

      This fucking cunt could end world hunger with his pocket change today, but wont.

      He could give ... $5 to everyone? Man, world hunger, solved.

      • Laughed out loud, wish I had mod points today.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • He could give ... $5 to everyone?

        $23 or $24 dollars to everyone. He's pretty rich.

        And, that would be a silly way to do it. Alternatively, he could buy ~1/3 of all US farmland, and use what it grows to feed starving people.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by lgw ( 121541 )

          $23 or $24 dollars to everyone. He's pretty rich.

          Half of that, if he gave all of his money and not just "pocket change".

          Alternatively, he could buy ~1/3 of all US farmland, and use what it grows to feed starving people.

          As opposed to what that land does now? Or do you mean he could destroy the livelyhood of farmers in poor nations by giving that food away for free? And who would he be taking that food away from in order to do that - you know, who buys that food today? And how would he convince local dictators, who are blocking current charities in order to control their people? How many divisions does Bezos have, and how many do you want him to have

          • Half of that, if he gave all of his money and not just "pocket change".

            $168 billion, divided by 7.5 billion people on earth, gives $23-24/person.

            Alternatively, he could buy ~1/3 of all US farmland, and use what it grows to feed starving people.

            As opposed to what that land does now?

            Right, he could sell corn for human consumption as opposed to turning it into ethanol, or letting it sit idle to get the tax subsidies, using it for livestock feed. He could ship it directly to wherever it's needed.

            And how would

    • There are people in North America who have the theoretical means to live a comfortable life but instead go hungry because of a lack of education.

      There is a lot more to improving the living conditions of a country than just a few hundred billion dollars. If that's all it took, someone would have done it by now because the benefits from having a prosperous ally for trade would be enormous.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kjella ( 173770 )

      This fucking cunt could end world hunger with his pocket change today, but wont.

      World hunger ended. We didn't have a single declared famine from 2011 to 2017 and the problem areas are all semi-active war zones. Of course the UN will continue to talk of undernourished and malnourished people but the mortality has dropped by over 90%. With the advances in farming we have no problem keeping up with the 1.1% [worldometers.info] growth/year, there's lots of other limited resources but growing a few percent more food is not a problem. Of course exponential growth can't go on forever but the long term solution i

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rtb61 ( 674572 )

      Yeah, lets stick to this rock in space, like a fungus, focusing our genitals and poseur status, woo hoo. Lets see who gets the biggest masturbation score, who gets masturbated the most, hell, not even trying to procreate, just practicing to fail at it?!?

      Personally I go with, lets colonise the stars and let future generations see what humanity will become. Fuck breeding out of control, fuck having sex the most and fuck poseur status. The stars represent real challenge and Bezos might well be a dick in every

  • How do you figure? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    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

    • Population growth is more cultural. The problem is these "Industrialized Nations" had created an economy where a child is considered an expense vs an asset. Then you combine the fact that people are expected to grow older and get married ave a steady work before having children, otherwise society will outcast you.
      However this is on the persons individual level.
      On the grand scheme, more people born in the society, the better the economy (Hence why much of the racist protectionist ideas is just stupid), becau

  • 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.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • I keep saying what this world needs is a good Ebola outbreak, but nooooo, those darn doctors keep messing with natural selection.

      What we really need is to cross Ebola with the common cold, even though that would be a terrible, terrible thing. It would certainly help in population reduction.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mentil ( 1748130 )

      The CDC is scarily good at preventing pandemics, so not likely. Even if that failed, it'd have to be caused by a prion, because vaccines and antibiotics are too effective. And no, a mythical superbacterium won't work because there are so darn many antibiotics, and avenues of research for new ones. If financial incentive (plague threatening western civilization) were to appear, lots of new antibiotics would come out in time.

      • Even if that failed, it'd have to be caused by a prion, because vaccines and antibiotics are too effective.

        Fine. We'll just have to develop a substance which can be sprayed into the atmosphere to make people more docile and receptive. Then we can begin real population control.

        What could possibly go wrong?

  • ...ship (cargo, people, something). The rest just talk about it.

  • Anything you have put in orbit. How about beyond Earth Orbit?

  • Musk vs. Bezos (Score:3)

    by Ukab the Great ( 87152 ) on Monday October 15, 2018 @02:53PM (#57481674)

    Elon Musk: weâ(TM)ll send humans to mars in 2024.

    Jeff Bezos: Hold my beer...

  • 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

    • More resources between Earth and Mars (Score:5, Interesting)

      by huckamania ( 533052 ) on Monday October 15, 2018 @03:23PM (#57481916) Journal

      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.

    • O'Neill Cylinder Space Settlement.

      Convert asteroids into space stations, and there's more than a 1000 times as much floor space as the Earth. (At least, in theory.)
      There's plenty of energy (sunlight), and lots of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen.
      Lots iron and carbon to make the steel for the walls, and lots of other filler to provide shielding.
      The only element that is in short supply is nitrogen, and you can get that from Titan. (or Earth if people will let you)

      If you could move 10,000 people from Earth to the

      • O'Neill Cylinder Space Settlement.

        Convert asteroids into space stations, and there's more than a 1000 times as much floor space as the Earth. (At least, in theory.)
        There's plenty of energy (sunlight), and lots of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen.
        Lots iron and carbon to make the steel for the walls, and lots of other filler to provide shielding.
        The only element that is in short supply is nitrogen, and you can get that from Titan. (or Earth if people will let you)

        If you could move 10,000 people from Earth to the belt per year, and assuming a yearly growth rate of 1.02%, you reach 1 trillion in under 400 years.
        100,000 per year, and a growth rate of 1.03% and it only takes 200 years.

        AFAIK, with current tech, it's possible to reach 1 trillion in system in less than 1 millennium.
        Traveling to another star system in less than 1 millennium with current tech, isn't.

        By the time we have the ability to do all that though, we'll also have the ability to go out of our solar system- if our species lasts long enough when we hit 1 trillion- we will probably be spread out amongst several solar systems when it happens. Who knows what technology we will have 1000 years from now; but a population would be more safe on a planet than an asteroid. Certainly, I know I'd rather live on a planet than an asteroid even an unterraformed one which would suggest moving extra-solar system.

    • Not for many millennia.

      With a net population growth of 0.1% per year, it'll be less than 5000 years.

      For 10k years, it'll require a net population growth of 0.05% per year.

      So, absent some factor limiting our population (being unable to get off this rock comes to mind), it won't be "many millenia" till we hit a trillion.

      • Not for many millennia.

        With a net population growth of 0.1% per year, it'll be less than 5000 years.

        For 10k years, it'll require a net population growth of 0.05% per year.

        So, absent some factor limiting our population (being unable to get off this rock comes to mind), it won't be "many millenia" till we hit a trillion.

        The technology to move beyond our solar system will happen before the technology to support 1 trillion people in this solar system though.

  • Narcissistic fuck (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    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-regulat

  • so many ruined planets. one day some aliens are going to develop a pesticide just to deal with humans.

  • How much energy will it take? (Score:3)

    by plopez ( 54068 ) on Monday October 15, 2018 @03:03PM (#57481762) Journal

    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?

    • Is there enough energy available on Earth to sustain this?

      Why would you use energy from /earth for sustaining an off world colony?

      Remember all rocket fuel we have now is petroleum based.

      Almost completely wrong. Liquid oxygen has no petroleum in it. Kerosene is partially used which is a petrochemical.

      Would the energy required leave the planet a raped burnt out husk?

      We could not possibly lift all humans off of this planet. The population is growing faster than we could possibly remove them. If you are born on this planet, you will likely stay on this planet.

      The greatest expansion in space faring humans will be humans that are born in space. No energy from Earth will be required.

      The fin

  • Quality not quantity (Score:3)

    by jd ( 1658 ) <`imipak' `at' `yahoo.com'> on Monday October 15, 2018 @03:05PM (#57481770) Homepage Journal

    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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mark-t ( 151149 )

      We ideally should have at most 1-2 billion on Earth

      Citation?

    • If we're just going to live underground anyway, wouldn't it be a lot easier to create underground colonies on Earth?

  • Or alternately (Score:3)

    by plopez ( 54068 ) on Monday October 15, 2018 @03:05PM (#57481772) Journal

    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.

    • Isn't $15/hr [cnbc.com] the amount that minimum wage activists have been suggesting for the past year or two?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by plopez ( 54068 )

        Ridiculously low. I ran some numbers and if you want adequate food, clothing, shelter, medical care, retirement, and a decent education for the kids you need about $50k to $60k. In other words there are many professionals making minimum wage or less.

        • A household with two breadwinners would be bringing home $60k/yr at $15/hr. Or is your suggestion that the minimum wage for Amazon's warehouse workers be $30/hr?

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by plopez ( 54068 )

            I knew some jerk was going to say this. Why can't one parent stay home and take acre of the kids? Kids need care. Why do you hate that idea?

            • The single-income family started dying out a long time before Jeff Bezos started opening his fulfillment centers.

              Even if we accept that a single-income family should be a minimum standard, I disagree that increasing the minimum wage is the way to do it. Either Amazon starts drastically overpaying high school kids working in their warehouses as a summer job, or the minimum wage comes on a sliding scale that disincentivizes hiring the people who most need the work. I think a more appropriate solution are i

  • 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?

  • 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 [nytimes.com] (New York Times, Aug. 15, 2015)

    Quote: "The company is conducting an experiment in how far it can push white-collar workers..."

    • . Evidence: Look at any Amazon web page. As you are researching some product that is interesting, you are often distracted by other products.

      That's not a problem for Amazon Those distractions are hugely profitable. Like, almost as huge a profit center as AWS.

  • 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?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by jwhyche ( 6192 )

      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 coul

  • Comment removed (Score:3)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday October 15, 2018 @03:30PM (#57481962)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      These rants are killing me. Elon says it and the knob gobblers lose their minds. Bezos says it and HOLY SHIT THIS IS THE DUMBEST THING EVAR!

      Truth is, as one of the plebes, I do hope we get off this rock somehow. And sadly, at the moment, it's in the hands of the bazillionaires because our governments are far more concerned with lining pockets than with actually accomplishing something. So, let the arrogant, rich bastards have their rants. Hope one or more of them succeed and we actually establish SOMET

    • You seem angry bro. Relax. It all goes away sooner or later.

      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

      Why would you want to grow a population in a gravity well? The outward growth will likely start with orbiting the Earth, grow to orbiting other planets/moons with resources, then fill out the asteroid belts, then directly orbiting the Sun, and eventually habitats will be moved to nebulas. In other words, the habitats will go where the raw materials and energy sources exist. There is no point in living in a gravity well. It is better to be mobile.

      In

  • Even more annoying assholes I have to deal with.
  • People, stop wasting your time with rockets. They're dangerous, delicate, prone to failure, inefficient, obscenely expensive, and just waiting to explode.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Sometimes you have to go to space with the technology you have.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mentil ( 1748130 )

      How else are you going to get that space elevator into orbit?

  • 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 sol

  • 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 fa

  • Utter and complete nonsense (Score:3)

    by Rick Schumann ( 4662797 ) on Monday October 15, 2018 @04:00PM (#57482172) Journal
    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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by yusing ( 216625 )

      Couldn't agree more. Ask yourself: where will the energy come from to power this vast expansion? Most of the easily-exploited energy sources have been pillaged and largely wasted, leaving us ready to fight over what's left.

      Maybe in a thousand years that option will exist. But where? there are NO other easily colonized locations. Colonies in space? Transporting megatons of physical resources into space? Herding asteroids together ... with what? Space mining? Space forging? Space welding?

      Pure fiction, science

    • 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).

      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 othe

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by neoRUR ( 674398 )

      Humm, so, we should have spend the billions of dollars we put into the Apollo program and space race into feeding the poor and helping people on earth, instead of landing on the Moon?
      By the same analogy we should be putting all our energy and resources into feeding and homing people on earth now?

      You do know that all the technology we have today, from GPS to cell phones to genetic engineering to medicine (with some exceptions) came out of the space programs and investigating how to live in space?

      If your not

      • "Negative conservative views" my ass, fucker, you apparently don't know shit. "Conservatives" don't want to feed the poor or take care of the homeless, they want to just dump them somewhere they don't have to look at them, and meanwhile gentrify everything so 'The Poor' can't afford any of it and become more homeless -- so they can just dump them somewhere they can't be seen, too. So you don't know shit about 'conservatism' and should STFU about that.

        Now, going to the Moon wasn't about advancing technolo

  • 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 hav

  • 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 i

  • He's mistaking his ego growth for population growth.

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