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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: 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!