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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, @09:02AM
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...