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posted by martyb on Monday July 17 2017, @02:53AM   Printer-friendly
from the postponing-the-inevitable dept.

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."


Original Submission

Related Stories

Blue Origin to Compete to Launch U.S. Military Payloads 1 comment

Blue Origin's orbital rocket in the running to receive U.S. military investment

Blue Origin submitted a proposal late last year in what's expected to be a four-way competition for U.S. Air Force funding to support development of new orbital-class rockets, a further step taken by the Jeff Bezos-owned company to break into the military launch market, industry officials said. The proposal, confirmed by two space industry sources, puts Blue Origin up against SpaceX, Orbital ATK and United Launch Alliance, which could use Blue Origin's BE-4 engine to power its next-generation Vulcan rocket. It also sets up the New Glenn rocket, in development by Blue Origin, to be certified by the Air Force for national security missions.

Blue Origin received funding in an earlier phase of the Air Force's initiative to help companies develop new liquid-fueled U.S.-built booster engines in a bid to end the military's reliance on the Russian RD-180 powerplant, which drives the first stage of ULA's Atlas 5 rocket. The Air Force's money supported development of the BE-4 engine, which was designed with private money, and is still primarily a privately-funded program. The Pentagon funding announced in early 2016 for the BE-4 program was directly awarded to ULA, which routed the money to Blue Origin's engine program.

SpaceX, Orbital ATK and Aerojet Rocketdyne also received Air Force funding in 2016 for propulsion work. SpaceX used the Air Force money for its methane-fueled Raptor engine, which will power the company's next-generation super-heavy BFR launcher. Orbital ATK is developing its own launcher for national security missions, which would use solid-fueled rocket motors for the initial boost into space, then use a hydrogen-fueled upper stage for orbital injection. Aerojet Rocketdyne's AR1 engine is a backup option for ULA's new Vulcan rocket.

Previously: U.S. Air Force Awards SpaceX $40.7 Million for Raptor Engine Development
Aerojet Rocketdyne Seeks More U.S. Air Force Funding for AR1 Rocket Engine

Related: Jeff Bezos' Vision for Space: One Trillion Population in the Solar System
NASA Opens Door to Possibly Lowering SLS Cost Using Blue Origin's Engines
SpaceX BFR vs. ULA Vulcan Showdown in the 2020s


Original Submission

Jeff Bezos Details Moon Settlement Ambitions in Interview 49 comments

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin are looking to partner with NASA and ESA to help create settlements on the Moon. However, he implied that he would fund development of such a project himself if governments don't:

Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos says his Blue Origin space venture will work with NASA as well as the European Space Agency to create a settlement on the moon. And even if Blue Origin can't strike public-private partnerships, Bezos will do what needs to be done to make it so, he said here at the International Space Development Conference on Friday night.

[...] To facilitate a return to the moon, Blue Origin has a lunar lander on the drawing boards that's designed to be capable of delivery 5 tons of payload to the lunar surface. That's hefty enough to be used for transporting people — and with enough support, it could start flying by the mid-2020s. Blue Origin has proposed building its Blue Moon lander under the terms of a public-private partnership with NASA. "By the way, we'll do that, even if NASA doesn't do it," Bezos said. "We'll do it eventually. We could do it a lot faster if there were a partnership."

[...] It's important to point out that moon settlement isn't just a NASA thing. Bezos told me he loves the European Space Agency's approach, known as the Moon Village. "The Moon Village concept has a nice property in that everybody basically just says, look, everybody builds their own lunar outpost, but let's do it close to each other. That way, if you need a cup of sugar, you can go over to the European Union lunar outpost and say, 'I got my powdered eggs, what have you got?' ... Obviously I'm being silly with the eggs, but there will be real things, like, 'Do you have some oxygen?' "

Jeff Bezos Talks about Blue Origin at Yale Club Event 29 comments

Jeff Bezos just gave a private talk in New York. From utopian space colonies to dissing Elon Musk's Martian dream, here are the most notable things he said.

  • Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, gave a talk to a members-only event at the Yale Club in New York on Tuesday.
  • During the 30-minute lecture, Bezos said his private aerospace company, Blue Origin, would launch its first people into space aboard a New Shepard rocket in 2019.
  • Bezos also questioned the capabilities of a space tourism competitor, Virgin Galactic, and criticized the goal of Elon Musk and SpaceX to settle Mars with humans.
  • Ultimately, Bezos said he wants Blue Origin to enable a space-faring civilization where "a Mark Zuckerberg of space" and "1,000 Mozarts and 1,000 Einsteins" can flourish.
  • Bezos advised the crowd to hold a powerful, personal long-term vision, but to devote "the vast majority of your energy and attention" on shorter-term activities and those ranging up to 2- or 3-year timeframes.

[...] Bezos: I don't think we'll live on planets, by the way. I think we'll live in giant O'Neal[sic]-style space colonies. Gerard O'Neil, decades ago, came up with this idea. He asked his physics students at Princeton a very simple question, but a very unusual one, which is: Is a planetary surface the right place for humanity to expand in the solar system? And after doing a lot of work, they came back and decided the answer was "no." There's a fascinating interview with Isaac Asimov, Gerard O'Neill, and their interviewer that you can find on YouTube from many decades ago. And to Asimov, the interviewer says, "Why do you think we're so focused, then, on expanding onto other planetary surfaces?" And Asimov says, "That's simple. We grew up on a planet, we're planet chauvinists."

Blue Origin Auctions New Shepard Seat for $28 Million 25 comments

Sold! Bidder pays $28m for spare seat on space flight with Jeff Bezos

Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin has sold the spare seat of the company's 20 July New Shepard space rocket blast-off for $28m, the company announced on Saturday.

With 20 active bidders starting at $4.8m during the 10-minute auction, bids escalated in the final three minutes of the sale. Initially, some 7,600 people registered to bid from 159 countries, the company said. The winner, whose identity has not been announced, will join the Amazon founder Bezos and his brother Mark on the flight.

The 11-minute, automated flight – the company's 16th but first carrying humans – will lift off from Van Horn, Texas. The capsule will carry as many as six passengers, though the company has not yet revealed who else will be onboard.

[...] The company has said the auction price will be donated to Blue Origin's foundation, Club for the Future, whose stated mission "is to inspire future generations to pursue careers in Stem (science, technology, engineering, and math) and to help invent the future of life in space".

Also at The Verge and BBC.

Previously: Jeff Bezos' Vision for Space: One Trillion Population in the Solar System
Jeff Bezos Will Fly on Blue Origin's First Human Spaceflight

Related: Branson May Make a Last-Ditch Effort to Beat Bezos Into Space


Original Submission

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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 17 2017, @02:54AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 17 2017, @02:54AM (#540137)

    Earth people will be given personality tests, anyone who scores as Uppity will be left behind to rot to death on the Earth.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 17 2017, @03:03AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 17 2017, @03:03AM (#540141)

    Humanity will be just as warlike

  • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 17 2017, @03:06AM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 17 2017, @03:06AM (#540142)

    > we would have 1,000 Einstein's

    What of Einstein's would we have 1000 of?

    • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 17 2017, @03:13AM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 17 2017, @03:13AM (#540144)

      Imagine the kind of shit a thousand Einsteins would have to endure.

      "I don't care if you are a genius! We have 999 other geniuses just like you. You'll do what you're told, when you're told, because you're told. You're fucking replaceable!"

      • (Score: 3, Touché) by davester666 on Monday July 17 2017, @07:30AM

        by davester666 (155) on Monday July 17 2017, @07:30AM (#540215)

        Just imagine...1000 worlds run by a 1000 Donald Trump's. "The Universe is a hoax!"

    • (Score: 3, Funny) by BK on Monday July 17 2017, @03:36AM

      by BK (4868) on Monday July 17 2017, @03:36AM (#540156)

      Bagels

      --
      ...but you HAVE heard of me.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 17 2017, @03:42AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 17 2017, @03:42AM (#540158)

      The bagel bros.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 17 2017, @03:14AM (11 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 17 2017, @03:14AM (#540146)

    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)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 17 2017, @03:25AM (#540153)

      Good luck avoiding AWS entirely.

      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by SanityCheck on Monday July 17 2017, @03:47AM

        by SanityCheck (5190) on Monday July 17 2017, @03:47AM (#540162)

        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

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 17 2017, @03:59AM (#540167)

        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)

      by Celestial (4891) on Monday July 17 2017, @03:27AM (#540154) Journal

      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

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 17 2017, @03:42AM (#540159)

        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

      by Fluffeh (954) Subscriber Badge on Monday July 17 2017, @04:27AM (#540171) Journal

      This guy is a megalomaniac piece of trash. He treats his employees like slaves, he uses the Washington Post as his personal propaganda arm...

      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)

      by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Monday July 17 2017, @04:56AM (#540182) Journal

      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)

        by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Monday July 17 2017, @05:49AM (#540194) Journal

        I only disagree with Musk's projected population

        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)

          by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Monday July 17 2017, @08:34AM (#540225) Journal

          LOL - think one thing, type another!

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 17 2017, @08:49AM (1 child)

            by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 17 2017, @08:49AM (#540226)

            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

              by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 17 2017, @02:32PM (#540316)

              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?

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 17 2017, @03:50AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 17 2017, @03:50AM (#540163)
    Definitely makes more sense than suicide trips to Mars...

    Allows us to buy more time...
  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Absolutely.Geek on Monday July 17 2017, @04:26AM (2 children)

    by Absolutely.Geek (5328) on Monday July 17 2017, @04:26AM (#540170)

    While the solar system could easily support 1T people; I don't think that level of population will be achieved any time soon.

    I have been watching The Expanse lately; cool show; and I think that the way the belters are treated in that show is depressingly likely to occur in the current societal mindset.

    if you haven't watched the show; basically the belters are treated like the the minimum wage slaves of the current world system; except if they get too uppity and try to protest/take action, air and water are withheld until they calm down.

    Whilst the Star Trek society is a cool idea; I find it hard to map from out existing society to the ST society. The rich and powerful are getting richer and hording more power...how to get from here to there is unclear.

    --
    Don't trust the police or the government - Shihad: My mind's sedate.
    • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday July 17 2017, @05:06AM (1 child)

      by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Monday July 17 2017, @05:06AM (#540185) Journal

      Get the books. The books (as usual) are better than the show. Some stuff in the series is simply not in the books. Stuff in the books didn't make it into the series. That is the normal when books and television meet, of course.

      That said, the TV series is about as awesome as awesome gets. The authors worked hard to get everything as scientifically correct as possible, and the TV series followed that idea. The TV series doesn't really depart from the story line in the books, it remains pretty faithful. The major differences amount to dramatic effect and artistic license, which is alright since the book's authors were there to make it work.

      And, I guess it's best to read the books in order of publication.

      No, I'm not posting any spoilers. If you want to know just how grand and sweeping the story gets, you'll have to start reading.

      I will tell you that the story goes beyond our own solar system, with humans living under other suns.

      • (Score: 2) by Absolutely.Geek on Monday July 17 2017, @06:07AM

        by Absolutely.Geek (5328) on Monday July 17 2017, @06:07AM (#540198)

        I'll have to get the books.

        I'm usually a reader more then a watcher; but this series hadn't shown up on my radar until it hit TV.

        --
        Don't trust the police or the government - Shihad: My mind's sedate.
  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by idiot_king on Monday July 17 2017, @04:27AM (6 children)

    by idiot_king (6587) on Monday July 17 2017, @04:27AM (#540172)

    I've noticed a trend with multibillionaires and their obsession with having as many people as possible on Earth (or, in this case, the solar system).
    Why is this? Well, it can be answered with a simple axiom: Capitalists see other sentient beings as capital. So it only makes sense that the rich want to see more dollar signs floating about the cosmos. After all, it's interesting that often you hear about things like eating bugs to cut down on (the barbaric practice of) meat consumption while at the same time donating large amounts of aid to impoverished nations which have out-of-control birthrates as it is. The whole point of this? Capitalist subversion, plain and simple.
    The reality is that the current population curve is a bubble (if you don't believe me, look at a graph of population over the past 2000 years and look at a graph of "The 5 Stages of a Bubble" and tell me if they look similar). If a billionaire wants billions floating about the cosmos, it's because that man has been infected with the Capitalist sickness and sees people nothing other than sacks of skin filled with gold. And thus the "Boom and Bust" cycle continues, only this time, with human lives. A truly dangerous game; Marx is turning in his grave! "God" help us...

    • (Score: 4, Interesting) by isostatic on Monday July 17 2017, @05:15AM (2 children)

      by isostatic (365) on Monday July 17 2017, @05:15AM (#540188) Journal

      I thought the conspiracy theorys were all about how billionaire new-world-order types wanted to curtail population?

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 17 2017, @06:55AM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 17 2017, @06:55AM (#540205)

        Contradiction is only seen as a problem by the NORMY SHEEPLE being Led by the Illuminatis. In the real reality, not the one orchestrated by our repilian overlords in cahoots with the aliens that brought them to power in 1947 (that's why they killed Kennedy), contradiction is smart. It means you COVER ALL YOUR BASES. You see if yes is wrong, then no must be right. So as long as you go yes and no, astronauts can land on the moon - but the moon is fake. Make sense?

        Also, 'theories' not theorys. Let us not be ignorant here.

        • (Score: 2) by isostatic on Tuesday July 18 2017, @01:25AM

          by isostatic (365) on Tuesday July 18 2017, @01:25AM (#540679) Journal

          Also, 'theories' not theorys. Let us not be ignorant here.

          I'll give you that. The rest of your post is far to advanced for my jet-lag addled brain at this time of day or night

    • (Score: 2) by takyon on Monday July 17 2017, @06:00AM

      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Monday July 17 2017, @06:00AM (#540196) Journal

      If the global or solar system economy grows, entertainment products may become more valuable since they can be instantly copied and beamed to theaters, VR headsets, whatever. More and more people exposed to a single piece of work. But then you might have more fragmentation canceling that effect out. Gone with the Wind remains the highest grossing film adjusted for inflation, but global population has more than tripled from 2.3 billion to about 7.5 billion since it was released.

      --
      [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 17 2017, @09:02AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 17 2017, @09:02AM (#540229)

      ORLY? I thought the sociopathic types would be pretty happy with a lot fewer people.

      Imagine you're a sociopathic Supreme Emperor of some high-tech world.

      The wants of a single greedy person may be infinite in theory but in practice when bounded by time the number of wants to be fulfilled per second would be a finite and relatively small number. Hence you wouldn't need billions of human slaves to make you happy. People are messy and not 100% predictable so why waste resources and increase your personal risk by keeping so many around?

      Once you have robots and automation doing most of the stuff for you, what you'd need the humans for would be:

      0) Elite bodyguards: cyborgs or armored tech augmented humans. Or AIs if you trust them to be more reliable.
      1) Warriors: private army. You probably wouldn't want too many of these and prefer to be using drones for most warfare.
      2) Entertainment/gene pool: worshippers, sex slaves, breeders, toys to play with or torture etc. You might need millions but I doubt you'd need billions or trillions.
      3) Slavemasters/Priests: those who manipulate or control the entertainment.
      4) Techs: can design, fix and build stuff that the robots and AIs can't, or can't be trusted to without supervision. You wouldn't need that many of these.

      In fact if most stuff is in space stations it's even easier to control there's no need for huge armies. If you control all the communications of all the space stations, you can control and contain most rebellions. At worst case you can just wipe everyone out in a space station or colony and start over. "Colony 151? There is only one colony: Colony 350. Congratulations citizen you have achieved Rapture".

      If you raise your army and bodyguards from a controlled environment and genestock it's easier to ensure loyalty. You can also do regular loyalty tests as some dictators did. e.g. have a different groups randomly going around waking people up in the middle of the night and say "Hey we're going to start a rebellion, we'll kill you if you don't join us". One of the people being woken up is the "target under test" while the others will pretend to join with the rebellion. If you fail the test, you'd be lucky/blessed to be allowed to die...

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 18 2017, @06:51AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 18 2017, @06:51AM (#540838)
      A real megalomaniac would kill almost everyone else and monopolize the resources to spread copies of himself throughout the universe.

      Why allow a trillion "inferior" copies of yourself when you can have a trillion machines that can replicate you?

      Of course that might mean torturing yourself in most cases ;).
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 17 2017, @05:10AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 17 2017, @05:10AM (#540186)

    Coo Coo, Coo Coo

  • (Score: 2) by looorg on Monday July 17 2017, @10:30AM (1 child)

    by looorg (578) on Monday July 17 2017, @10:30AM (#540244)

    Why would we want a trillion population? Are we not all getting replaced by robots and AI:s? If anything in a world like that they would need less actual humans. What would they/we need a trillion humans for spread across the galaxy? I guess robots and AI:s don't order shit of Amazon so that is why he still needs us but beyond that I have no idea.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 17 2017, @06:57PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 17 2017, @06:57PM (#540480)

      I think people probably start to look at things in terms of species wide goals once they reach the point of having reached the point of nearly maximized personal achievement.

      So what would you see as a goal you could contribute to for our species? I think the thing we're seeing ever more people latch onto is simply survival. The Fermi Paradox is kind of disconcerting. Everything we know indicates that there should be countless other species out there, yet everything we can observe indicates this universe is a pretty lonely place. What greater legacy for an individual than helping to secure the future of our species itself?

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 17 2017, @03:54PM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 17 2017, @03:54PM (#540356)

    1000 Mozarts is not really better than one Mozart. You'll get bored with his sound, and if they all have to share the fame, celebrity status will be reduced. And with the growth of opportunity, it would be a mistake to think that the likes of Einstein do no exist today. What would prevent Einstein version 2.0 or 3.0? Presumably modern day Einsteins do exist, but they are not leaving their mark the way the original did.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 17 2017, @07:04PM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 17 2017, @07:04PM (#540485)

      As technology progresses the outliers required to push things forward start requiring great and greater personal achievement. Elon Musk is certainly a name that will go down in the history books. But look at what his emergence required:

        - somebody with at least hundreds of millions of dollars
        - phenomenal physics/engineering talent
        - phenomenal business talent
        - a prioritization of something beyond money
        - a reckless willingness and ability to put it all at risk in pursuit of the goal mentioned in point 4.

      Some of those talents are seen as generally mutually exclusive. #1 in particular tends to be near mutually exclusive with all except #3. Mozart required nothing more than the ability to play and 'envision' music very well. Einstein required a strong mathematics background, an extremely strong physics background, and the creativity of a child. Modern day Einsteins certainly do exist, but we now need something beyond Einstein. Similarly like modern day Edisons exist, but you need something beyond that to become an Elon Musk.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 18 2017, @12:23AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 18 2017, @12:23AM (#540658)

        fanboi much?

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 18 2017, @09:02PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 18 2017, @09:02PM (#541163)

        and a little help from the CIA

    • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Tuesday July 18 2017, @04:36AM

      by kaszz (4211) on Tuesday July 18 2017, @04:36AM (#540779) Journal

      Modern day Einsteins would be buried under "common core" and societal ideology. To succeed, it seems easier to do that outside of the system of schools and wage slavery.

  • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Tuesday July 18 2017, @05:01AM

    by kaszz (4211) on Tuesday July 18 2017, @05:01AM (#540789) Journal

    "We can harvest resources /../ The alternative, he said, was an era of stasis and stagnation on Earth, where we are forced to control population and limit energy usage" and then.. *drumbeat* "make it possible to support one trillion people". So we enable ourselves to do away with scarcity in practice only to use it up to breed because.. mooaahr babies better? He's a megalomaniac or at best greedy asshole.
    What happens to those trillion people when the resources to feed them runs out, again is easy to figure out. At least the end result.

    Einstein's and Mozart's are already here. It's just that the society is not conducive to them. It's related to societal virtues, school, job market etc. Present day Einstein would be bullied to death because he didn't belong to the popular pack. Be bogged down with ridiculous rote learning tests. Parents would want to him to do sports and be like other normal kids. The library would not have anything that mattered to read. College only accept those ridiculous tests and people indulged in the right ideology shit of the year. The work would not allow any spare time because of slimmed organization. Instead any slack in time would be used for drilling the ideology of the day. etc..

    Pioneering, exploration and expansion needs not people in general but bright and creative people. And a hands off approach from management which Bezos is unlikely to be. Besides it seems likely he would cut corners on safety issues when the opportunity comes up. After all pushing people until they collapse is just what he does right now.

    Musk already do the reusable rocket thing. So what is holding back Bezos is likely himself and his management style.

    If the history says anything it is that the future will be better with more machinery and less people. But it got to be nurtured and educated people not some sexual accident. We got enough of random people on earth already.

    Can't Trump ban Bezos from space? :-)

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