Jeff Bezos: Future Humans 'Will Visit the Earth the Way You Visit Yellowstone' (gizmodo.com) 191
According to Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos, future generations "will visit Earth the way you visit Yellowstone National Park." Gizmodo reports: The remarks came last week at an event held at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC, with NASA Administrator Bill Nelson and others talking about space policy. Bezos sat down for a one-on-one chat with Adi Ignatius, the editor-in-chief of the Harvard Business Review. He brought up themes we've heard before, including his vision that all polluting industries will exist in space one day and that we'll all live on space colonies that could, in his estimation, support 1 trillion people. But he expanded on his vision in greater detail about what, exactly, will happen to the planet we'll all leave behind for Blue Origin-branded space colonies.
"This is the most precious planet in the world and we have to preserve it and conserve it and make sure that our children and their children and so on have this beauty in their lives," Bezos said. "We need to conserve what we have, restore what we've lost," he said. "This planet is so small, if we want to keep growing as a civilization, using energy as a civilization, most of that needs to be done off-planet. ... This place is special. You can't ruin it." To do that will require us all to live in space colonies. That would leave Earth to eventually be, in Bezos' vision, a place for future folks to visit but not live. "They may visit Earth the way you visit Yellowstone National Park," Bezos said. Ignatius asked a follow-up about who gets to live on Earth in this vision, which Bezos did not answer. "It's extremely telling that Bezos' vision for the future of Earth is Yellowstone National Park," comments Gizmodo's Brian Kahn, a former park ranger. "Bezos' big idea of turning Earth into Yellowstone elides the fact that humans are as much a part of this planet as they were part of Yellowstone before Americans showed up. He's pitching a very Western solution to the very Western problem of climate change and environmental degradation, problems that Bezos' very own businesses have played a major role in while enriching him to the point where he now has a huge sway on humanity's next step."
"This is the most precious planet in the world and we have to preserve it and conserve it and make sure that our children and their children and so on have this beauty in their lives," Bezos said. "We need to conserve what we have, restore what we've lost," he said. "This planet is so small, if we want to keep growing as a civilization, using energy as a civilization, most of that needs to be done off-planet. ... This place is special. You can't ruin it." To do that will require us all to live in space colonies. That would leave Earth to eventually be, in Bezos' vision, a place for future folks to visit but not live. "They may visit Earth the way you visit Yellowstone National Park," Bezos said. Ignatius asked a follow-up about who gets to live on Earth in this vision, which Bezos did not answer. "It's extremely telling that Bezos' vision for the future of Earth is Yellowstone National Park," comments Gizmodo's Brian Kahn, a former park ranger. "Bezos' big idea of turning Earth into Yellowstone elides the fact that humans are as much a part of this planet as they were part of Yellowstone before Americans showed up. He's pitching a very Western solution to the very Western problem of climate change and environmental degradation, problems that Bezos' very own businesses have played a major role in while enriching him to the point where he now has a huge sway on humanity's next step."
Heinlein called it... (Score:3)
And, as Heinlein explained when he wrote about Loonies who find they can't bear to be around so many stupid people when they return from the moon to visit Earth, it's very simple why Earth will never be depopulated by emigration: Nobody is going to pay to send idiots into space. Not at $10000 a kilogram, not at $1000/kg, not at $100/kg which is probably the lowest number I've ever seen bandied about.
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Even if space travel becomes more practical, it will never be cheap in the foreseeable future.
And, as Heinlein explained when he wrote about Loonies who find they can't bear to be around so many stupid people when they return from the moon to visit Earth, it's very simple why Earth will never be depopulated by emigration: Nobody is going to pay to send idiots into space. Not at $10000 a kilogram, not at $1000/kg, not at $100/kg which is probably the lowest number I've ever seen bandied about.
Aliens are just billionaires from other planets...
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That's the lowest number you've seen bandied about? Starship's goal is $10/kg to LEO. Now, one can't just write overhead out of the picture when dealing with humans (it's sizable), but since you were giving raw $/kg figures...
Re: Heinlein called it... (Score:3)
Re: Heinlein called it... (Score:5, Insightful)
Wasn't it comparably expensive to send boatloads of Europeans to the Americas & convicts to Australia a few hundred years ago?
Not really, no.
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No it really wasn't expensive; at least not comparatively with imprisoning them at home, or the political cost of executing people for often pettety crimes that could get you sentenced to transportation. The religious extremists (by which you mean people who were both independent and sincere) mostly traveled at their own expense. The kings and Europe basically told them here we will grant you land in the new world if you'll just leave!
As far as the criminals went transportation was sentence where there was
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Well. Kind of.
Investors funded sending the Puritans and other groups to the New World for a large number of shares in the company. The immigrants themselves would also get a small number of shares, along with basic survival supplies. After a fixed predetermined period of building up the colony, the shares would be exchanged for ownership rights of the colony's assets (land, building
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Wasn't it comparably expensive to send boatloads of Europeans to the Americas & convicts to Australia a few hundred years ago? Very expensive but turned out to be an effective way to get rid of religious extremists & sheep rustlers.
The standard contract to get across the ocean seemed to be 7 years indentured servitude. So using the median income of the USA, that would be about $200k.
So that would be about $2000/kg if we are only talking the person and not any of their stuff.
There is a huge difference though. People were willing to give up 7 years of their lives to move to a place with bountiful resources and more freedom so basically move to Yellowstone.
Jeff Bezos is proposing the opposite. Who in their right mind would permanentl
Re: Heinlein called it... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Posted by someone who's not driven in both countries, obviously.
Re:Heinlein called it... (Score:4, Interesting)
The Earth is prime land for humans. No other celestial body we know of comes even close to conditions on Earth for humans. Even if we colonize Mars, 90% of all inhabitable land in our Solar system is on Earth, because Mars is comparatively small. People from Mars will have a hard time to even move on Earth, as they have to endure three times the gravitational pull as on Mars. Their bones won't even be able to withstand their own weight, because the strength of your bones depends on the forces they endured during their formation and growth.
We won't be able to colonize the gas giants, as they have no surface we can live on, and they don't consist of the right materials to form a surface under conditions we humans need. (Yes, Hydrogen can form a metal structure under the right conditions, but the conditions would turn humans into dirty diamonds). They have some large moons though, but their number is limited, and they mainly consist of water ice mixed with some dirt, so no prime estate either.
And everything else is too far away to even allow for sustained travel networks. Traveling there is a one way road, as no one will come back from there, and their offspring, if they ever come back, have diverged from everything we know on Earth that for them.
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People really tend to forget, how much of Nothing is out there. The average content of one cubic meter of Solar System is .000,000,040 kg of stuff, and 99% of it is in the Sun itself and mainly Hydrogen and Helium, both not really usable as building material for anything.
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Nobody is going to pay to send idiots into space. Not at $10000 a kilogram, not at $1000/kg, not at $100/kg which is probably the lowest number I've ever seen bandied about.
Of course it won’t work that way, you need economies of scale. Make an ark big enough to take half of earths population and let them board the first of two escape ships. It’s not like earth would really be destroyed and the ship sent back in time to crash on earth and be our actual ancestors...
Re: Heinlein called it... (Score:2)
Re: Heinlein called it... (Score:2)
just an effort (Score:5, Insightful)
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at greenwashing. after being called out for spending billions just to measure his space-peen against musk's. He doesn't care, he will be dead by then (unless we reach some sort of biological immortality in the next 20-30 years).
He's probably done more for "green" than anybody here.
Packages routed in groups by carriers are way more energy efficient than all of us driving all over town to different stores to get stuff.
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I just happened to see an article on this, and it's really not clear whether online or in-person shopping is better environmentally [politico.com], it depends on the exact conditions of the delivery or shopping trip.
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It's not even that. He's just trying to make out that he's the first person to privately reach space*, and that it's some kind of great achievement**, a life-changing experience that gives him new insight into the world so we should all listen carefully to what he has to say. And in this case what he has to say is just some trite old pulp sci-fi rubbish.
* He wasn't, Branson was, and neither of them made it to orbit.
** 70 years later he can't even replicate what a bunch of guys who were mostly farmers a few
Thanks to (Score:2)
SpaceX
Grow up (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Grow up (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3)
It will always be cheaper to send robots. If the robots can't do the job, it is cheaper to build better robots than to send humans to deep space.
Re: Grow up (Score:2)
Re: Grow up (Score:2)
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Space is an extremely inhospitable place
Only for biological life. We need warmth, moisture, and oxygen.
But for life-in-silico, cold, dry, and anaerobic is perfect. We will not journey to the stars, but our AI-children will.
Re: Grow up (Score:2)
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Strong ionizing radiation, extreme temperature excursions, corrosive substances, high void or crushing pressures...
It is much easier to adapt silico-life to radiation than to adapt carbo-life. Use depleted boron-11 as a dopant, and you solve 90% of the problem. ECC and memory scrubbing can fix the rest.
Temperature is more consistent in space than on earth.
I have no idea what you mean by "corrosive substances", and there are no "crushing pressures" in space.
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Re: Grow up (Score:2)
Re:Grow up (Score:5, Funny)
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If UFOs are real then it sure as hell isn't anything biological in those craft doing alleged 200G maneuvers.
Re: Grow up (Score:2)
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I guess so. But a civilisation capable of that level of technology would probably have gone way beyond the point at which their AIs superceed their biological form so why bother putting biologicals in the craft anyway?
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If they can generate and modify gravity, they can do the same with inertia.
Most likely: nope.
You could only claim: "if they use artificial gravity to accelerate the ship, the bodies inside would be accelerated the same way".
Considering that you need to fold space time, and that the folding is based on the energy contained in the mass: there never will be any civilization controlling gravity or space time.
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This would allow you to manufacture compounds containing CNHO atoms in a hypothetical closed Antarctica base, but without access to some kind of soil (or regolith to turn into soil), you would be doomed in the long term without someone shipping you vitamin p
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Your question actually provides the answer to humans colonizing space. Antarctica is hostile to human life in the way you described, but even there it's orders of magnitude more hospitable than even mars would be.
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Bezos probably figures that the Earth is fucked and people like him will end up living off-world in luxury space accommodation.
Re: Grow up (Score:3)
Re: Grow up (Score:2)
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Space is an extremely inhospitable place and even if and when we have the technology for it, people won't go live there in the same way as now they don't go live in Antarctica.
You are exactly and perfectly wrong. People will build absurdly large space habitats and move out of gravity wells and into nebulas where there are absurdly large amounts of resources.
These habitats will be "perfectly" controlled to minimize the randomness that the Universe has to offer. Very few will choose to live in an uncontrolled environment such as one found on a planet like Earth. We will essentially place our civilization in amber so 5 billion years from now when the Universe is a vastly different p
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Space is an extremely inhospitable place and even if and when we have the technology for it, people won't go live there in the same way as now they don't go live in Antarctica.
Eventually we will have interstellar travel, so it seems likely that we will be living on nice planets we find. It's also quite likely that we will be terraforming planets (an moons?) inside our own star system.
Space is really big and we've only just begun to journey into it.
Re: Grow up (Score:2)
Why space? (Score:2)
Re:Why space? (Score:5, Funny)
This is slashdot, most of us already live underground.
That doesnâ(TM)t make sense. (Score:3)
The earth can easily accommodate billions of people with no risk to its ecosystem. Itâ(TM)s an incredible source of natural resources. Bezos is talking like he doesnâ(TM)t know anything about the environment, or industry, or space. He just wants to find a way to kick all us peasants off so he doesnâ(TM)t have to look at our ugly faces.
Butt... (Score:5, Insightful)
How do we get up there, Jeffy? How the holy fuck do we get 400,000 people off this planet every day?
Far out, man, you are celebrating each time you get 4 people to the edge of space (not orbit), and now you think you can move humanity into space?
400,000 people per day. That's the current birth rate. If you cannot match this, you have no damn hope in hell of getting humanity off the planet.
Take your damn blue balls and piss off.
Easy solution... (Score:2)
I like your observation. but the easy (final?) solution is that to people like Bezos, if you don't get off the planet then you are just an archaeological exhibit.
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Your logic destroys my ability to feel empathy for the bald anti-messiah.
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How do we get up there, Jeffy? How the holy fuck do we get 400,000 people off this planet every day?
Why would you need to get 400,000 per day off the planet? They will be dead in 100 years. Forget about them. You only need to get enough people off the planet to create a self-sustaining population.
TL;DR, The individual doesn't matter
Ruh roh (Score:2)
"But he expanded on his vision in greater detail about what, exactly, will happen to the planet we'll all leave behind for Blue Origin-branded space colonies."
Keyboard warrior legion, assemble!
This will sure get people worked up over nothing.
"Space colonies brought to you by Mc Donalds!" "Space colonies brought to you by Google" yawn, whatever.
I do however expect a few will be company towns of whatever intergalactic ore mining company exists during this time. Just history repeating itself.
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While a colony on Mars is possible, its a shitty gravity well. You are trading being stuck in that gravity well for the resources that planet can offer. Bad deal.
To make Mars something other than a one-way gravity well, you need space stations. But wait...
Its only a little bit further out to the asteroid belt.. and as anyone wh
Dubious Claim (Score:3)
"This is the most precious planet in the world..."
How does he know that for sure? Maybe one day we'll find a planet made of fine porcelain or platinum covered in gold leaf.
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Either they quoted the wrong person, or as usual Bezos is copying everything Musk is saying to try and look cool.
Re:Dubious Claim (Score:4, Funny)
"This is the most precious planet in the world..."
Just how many planets are in the world, anyway?
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Even worst than that, think about the sentence for a second.
There's no planet in the world, as "the world" usually implies planet Earth. There's no planet inside a planet, that makes no sense. And if he had said "This is the most precious planet in the Universe" then we'd be offending hundreds of sentient species, and possibly be at war with a few dozen of them.
Wrong (Score:2)
If there will even be any future humans, they will not visit Earth the same say you don't visit the garbage dump. Bezos yet again shows he lives in a completely different reality than the rest of us. What a Bozo.
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What a Bezos.
FTFY
TL;DR: I now say "Bezos" instead of "Bozo" since it makes much more sense in most contexts.
I like how all the rich bastards drop the sharade (Score:2)
From Elon Musk's "I keep forgetting that you're still alive" to Bezos trying to shoo away all poor people, it feels like more will be lining up soon to confess their disgust for commoners. Tax the rich.
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For the life of me, I'm still trying to figure out what's so horrible about saying, "I keep forgetting that you're still alive" in response to Bernie-Three-Homes agitating against him.
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Where I suspect by "commoners" you mean people who work low status jobs, like plumbers, electricians, construction workers
I think Musk likes those people. The dude is a builder, a maker. Of course he likes other makers and builders.
Bezos on the other hand... "The dude is a
Re: I like how all the rich bastards drop the shar (Score:2)
Musk only likes himself. A while ago the guy called a rescue crew pedophiles just because they refused his help.
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I don't get the impression that Musk likes those people at all. His statements on Twitter and the way he treats staff at his factories suggest he sees them as disposable commodity items his businesses need to operate.
must is not a builder (Score:3)
This may be possible, but (Score:5, Insightful)
perhaps (Score:2)
In related news... (Score:5, Funny)
Future Amazon employees will be know as belta loada.
Terraform Mars. Terraform Earth. (Score:3, Interesting)
The plan to produce the oxygen, water, rocket fuel, heat, and light for a Mars colony is to use the materials available on Mars and process into what is needed with nuclear fission. We can do that on Earth too as a means to minimize environmental damage from human activity. It will be a kind of terraforming.
The processing of materials on Mars to produce habitats will produce more oxygen than we need to breath or for fuel. This will simply be dumped into the thin Martian atmosphere. Over time this will thicken it. What will also be dumped into the atmosphere are inert fission product gasses, thickening the atmosphere more. The scale on which the terraforming will happen depends on how quickly people act on bringing people to Mars, and if this leakage of oxygen, CO2, and inert gasses is incidental or deliberate. On Earth the inert gasses that maintain lung function and keep fires from burning everything is nitrogen. I don't know how much nitrogen would be produced incidentally so while people may be able to explore Mars with a heavy coat and an O2 supplement, like hikers on high mountains, I have to wonder how plant life will develop in a low N2 environment. We'd build greenhouses for food where the N2 can be controlled. How hard can it be to get sufficient N2 to the Martian atmosphere. Can that be produced in our nuclear reactors like inert gasses would? We know that there's plenty of H2 and O2 locked up in the rock which can be liberated with refining the ore into aluminum, iron, copper, thorium, and uranium.
Enough time of mining the air may be thick enough with inert gasses and O2 to allow people to no longer need masks, and livestock could be allowed to roam outside a habitat. The food would have to be brought to them, and maybe their manure collected to augment artificial fertilizers in the greenhouses. Whatever the case these same tactics can be brought to Earth. We can build greenhouses on Earth where the air inside is tightly controlled with an optimal mix of O2, CO2, and inert gasses like N2 to keep the plants growing. Outside the air would likely be lacking something to sustain life, that's why people left, correct? Not enough O2? Too much CO2? These can be fixed on Earth just like on Mars.
Like on Mars the Earth cannot support this necessary mix for plants in the wild. At least not the same plants we value for food, clothing, building material, and so on. Maybe we can grow livestock that eat this stuff, with some food from the greenhouses
I'm assuming Earth was rendered a near lifeless planet by global warming, resource wars, meteor impact, or some combination. This puts the people on Mars on equal footing with those on Earth to terraform. As similar as they are there will be differences. Does Earth have too much CO2 or Mars? Is there an ice age on either planet? We could see trade for heavy water to get ammonia fertilizer. Maybe there is trade for zinc plated thoriated steel, a material suited for protecting spacecraft from micrometeorite impact, on a transorbit path. cosmic rays while in deep space, thermal protection during an aerobraking maneuver, and corrosion on a water landing. Then once on Mars this spaceship would immediately be scrapped to make a thorium breeder reactor. A fine ship to get someone to Mars with no intent to return. Any ammonia on board would serve well as coolant, fertilizer, or rocket fuel if desperate to get back on course.
If the problem is people leaving Earth because of global warming and/or a collapse of the magnetic field that protected Earth, then what one needs to live on Mars or Earth will be much the same.
I'll have people claim we can't goto Mars until we have Earth in order. I say we won't learn how to manage Earth until we learn on Mars. What we learn on Mars will have ann immediate impact on Earth when they com back.
What they can grow on Mars should just thrive on Earth. This should be a test of how moderate Armour ships will handle the orbital; waste. Will more armour be needed, or will less sufficie. Expect top bring a second reactor to sppeed alopmg the production off air suppy. Expect a shooting war, bring small arms and ammunition.
The way I visit Yellowstone? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
They'll be lazy about securing their space food and get attacked by space bears.
Signed,
Archer (Season 10).
seize Bezos wealth, give it to Brian Kahn (Score:2)
...he's obviously more smart and more honest. And he's completely right. "Let's run away, it's all fucked here" is a 0.001% attitude, because that's approximately the percentage of the human population we can actually manage to move somewhere else in the time we have available.
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Very much that, it is cheaper for a few elites to dump this planet and relocate than to fix the whole thing.
Also there is a huge tendency to underestimate the relative cost of planetary relocation compared to creating acceptable living conditions here. If you can create a habitat in a dome on mars you can also do it here, and cheaper. The planet would indeed have to be very far gone before mars-like habitats become impossible here.
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We tried that here, but it didn't work because most people don't like Pauly Shore.
The stupidest ones... (Score:2)
... will fall into superheated pools?
Hard to see the down side.
As if there's a future for humans (Score:3, Interesting)
What "future humans" does he mean?
If you look how the humans handle a global crisis like Covid-19, and are still struggling to do anything on climate crisis, extinction of the species, and environmental pollution, I don't think there's a future for humans.
This is why we are fucked (Score:2)
"This is the most precious planet in the world" (Score:2)
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More like Pompeii (Score:2)
And it won't be humans visiting. It'll be alien archeologists trying to figure out how and why we killed ourselves when all we had to do was not fuck up our biosphere.
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Let 'em leave - we'll be better for it. (Score:2)
Just tell them we'll all be following along on the next ark while they sail off like the Golgafrincham hairdressers, telephone sanitizers, and middle managers.
Danger will Robinson (Score:2)
Earth is the Destination. (Score:2)
I know Bezos only made it into "kinda-space" with his lame attempt at that billionaire race, but this idiotic claim? Come on. We've seen enough of the barren wastelands of other planets to know damn well that for the average human, that truly foreign scenery will be the shit that people will only be able to want to tolerate for a temporary time. Those who come back to "visit" Earth, will likely never want to leave.
At least not until you turn half the moon into a fucking shopping mall.
Space is ugly and da
I'm all for space exploration (Score:2)
Yes, we will live in space, and I'm convinced - if we don't kill ourselves first - that we will reach the stars. And I'm convinced space tourism paves the way. But none of that matters a flying fuck until we fix things back home.
Sick only a Capitalist would think (Score:2)
Hey, let’s objectify what’s left of a planet and make money off that!
Bezos rocket is just an object. No wonder his ex bailed
They should do it quickly... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
So.. (Score:2)
Being aware you're walking on a potential time bomb that could blow up?
No wonder (Score:2)
No wonder she divorced him. He's ready for the loony bin now.
genius (Score:5, Funny)
> This is the most precious planet in the world
That is some true genius right there, Jeff.
Not if physics has anything to say about it (Score:2)
Gravity really does suck. The amount of energy required to lift any appreciable amount of mass off this planet is crazy. Every space launch is an environmental disaster in its own right, generating gigatons of carbon and nasty stuff.
Getting Jeff and his billionaire buddies to space to make a temporary colony on Moon or Mars will leave Earth looking like Venus looks today.
People with too much wealth and highly-specialized brains shouldn't be running things for everyone. Stick to websites Jeff.
Re: Rich asshole is delusional; news at 11 (Score:2)
When we see the first "Bezosworld" in space, we should start being a bit concerned.
Right now, we can't even get a man back on the moon, and the only people 'living' in space are people who went through a fuckton of rigorous training to spend an extended time floating inside of a tin can.
Actual space colonies are still well inside the realm of Buck Rogers sci-fi.
So yes, Bezos is just frothing at the mouth and I'll be dead long before any space colony for the regular folk has it's first support pylon
Re: I have some remarks about the future too (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: The meek shall inherit the earth. (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)
First learn to use paragraphs, then we'll read your comments.
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It's a stone that yellow, duh.
Not sure why that particular stone is so popular, though. Maybe a founding father threw it at some jackass or something.
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Who cares? I want to visit the Temples of Syrinx.