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Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos talked about his vision for Blue Origin and humanity at the Apollo 11 Gala at Kennedy Space Center:
For Bezos, colonising space is a more a simple necessity for continued life on Earth. The compound effect of the incremental increase in energy requirements will mean us having to cover every inch of Earth in solar cells, he said, while the solar system offers virtually unlimited energy resources.
"We can harvest resources from asteroids, from Near-Earth Objects, and harvest solar energy from a much broader surface area – and continue to do amazing things," he said. The alternative, he said, was an era of stasis and stagnation on Earth, where we are forced to control population and limit energy usage per capita.
"I don't think stasis is compatible with freedom or liberty, and I sure as hell think it's going to be a very boring world – I want my grandchildren's grandchildren to be in a world of pioneering, exploration and expansion throughout the solar system."
He also suggested that exploration and colonisation of the solar system would make it possible to support one trillion people.
"Then we would have 1,000 Einstein's and 1,000 Mozarts, how cool would that be?" he said.
"What's holding us back from making that next step is that space travel is just too darned expensive because we throw the rockets away. We need to build reusable rockets and that's what Blue Origin is dedicated to."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 17 2017, @03:14AM (11 children)
This guy is a megalomaniac piece of trash. He treats his employees like slaves, he uses the Washington Post as his personal propaganda arm, and in general I cannot think the world is better with him in it.
I'll never knowingly spend so much as a dollar with any business Bezos owns, and if the rest of you did the same, the world would be a better place.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 17 2017, @03:25AM (2 children)
Good luck avoiding AWS entirely.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by SanityCheck on Monday July 17 2017, @03:47AM
Well once Alicloud finishes whole-sale cloning of AWS, you can do just that.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 17 2017, @03:59AM
I've never ordered anything directly from Amazon -- years ago they started a pissing match with a small technical publisher I work with (long story) and I've been in personal boycott mode ever since then.
But I will agree that Amazon are pervasive, last year I bought something from eBay and when it arrived the return address was an Amazon fulfillment center. Looks like that eBay seller outsourced their logistics.
Our Walmart is just around the corner and at the end of last year they moved the ship-to-store pickup desk to the front of the store. Very convenient, I open stuff at their counter and if I don't like it I can return on the spot for instant credit, no repackaging. We still have a big Sears nearby too--their website is often a mess, but they have appliance repair parts for good prices (like the clothes washer pump I replaced a couple of years back).
(Score: 2) by Celestial on Monday July 17 2017, @03:27AM (1 child)
The problem is, for various reasons, there are very few if any decent alternatives to Amazon. For online shopping of physical products, sure there's Walmart, but most people consider it just as bad if not worse. Digital comic books and graphic novels? Amazon has a near stranglehold on it after it purchased Comixology. The only real alternative for digital comic books and graphic novels is Google Play Books, and Google has its own issues. Plus, I've tried it. It's not nearly as nice to use nor as easy to organize as Amazon's Comixology. For physical books, there's Barnes & Noble but that looks to be in its death throes as it's losing money each quarter with no real plan on how to stop the blood loss, nonetheless grow. For eBooks, there's Ratuken's Kobo, but their catalog isn't nearly as good as Amazon's. Even then, quite a few independent eBook authors tend to only publish their works on Amazon, because that's all they know and/or care about.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 17 2017, @03:42AM
Six years ago I remember I had a completely worthless conversation about Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud. I was chatting with a blockhead who thought I was talking about buying books from the Amazon bookstore the entire time. I can see times do not change.
Dude, bro, like, Amazon is a bookstore. Just forget the cloud, which is much much much much much more pervasive than a bookstore. Bookstore, bro! Like, dude! Bro! Dude!
(Score: 1, Funny) by Fluffeh on Monday July 17 2017, @04:27AM
There there Donald, the bad man was just kidding when he said your hands were abnormally small. And yes, we agree, he's a total meanie for picking up on all the White House antics in his newspaper!
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday July 17 2017, @04:56AM (4 children)
Perhaps you could make a list of people who have pushed the world forward, who WERE NOT nucking phutts. Name a famous (or infamous) person, and what do you have? A PERSON. People are complicated. All people have their strengths and weaknesses. And, strangely enough, sometimes it's the person's weakness that ends up making him great. Start naming people from industry, religion, philosophy, politics, or whatever else, and we can find their detractors. Often times, those detractors are just as right as the supporters - the man (or woman) at the center of Getting Shit Done® is somehow "defective".
And, none of that changes the truth of what the "defective person" says.
I only disagree with Musk's projected population because I think *something* will happen to push people beyond the solar system before the population gets that high. Generation ships, or suspended animation, or Faster Than Light, or wormholes, or any of a number of other Science Fiction ideas will happen, and mankind will gain access to planets far more hospitable than the various rocks we are looking at within our own solar system.
Face it, not much of the solar system looks very hospitable for earth life. We've got earth, where life is easy, and we've got a very limited number of candidates where life will be pretty damned difficult for decades or centuries.
(Score: 3, Funny) by takyon on Monday July 17 2017, @05:49AM (3 children)
Lol @ Bezos, the second fiddle of the commercial space race.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Touché) by Runaway1956 on Monday July 17 2017, @08:34AM (2 children)
LOL - think one thing, type another!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 17 2017, @08:49AM (1 child)
WTF- Think nothing, type loads of bullshit. We know what you were thinking, Runaway! NOT!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 17 2017, @02:32PM
Fascinating, that you are so obsessed with Runaway. When you grow up, you want to be just like him, right? Or, is it more personal than that?