Jeff Bezos made his billions with Amazon but he’s set his sights way beyond that now.
The world's richest person, Jeff Bezos, unveiled his sweeping vision for humanity on Thursday afternoon in a Washington D.C. ballroom. With the lights dimmed, Bezos spoke on stage for an hour, outlining plans for his rocket company, Blue Origin, and how it will pave the way to space for future generations.
Bezos revealed its hydrogen-fuelled Blue Moon lunar lander at a special event in the United States. He also laid out a convincing argument as to why humanity’s future may no longer be on Earth or any other planetary surface. Citing energy consumption, increasing population, resource depletion, and climate change, the richest man in the world believes we will eventually need to leave this planet.
An artist's rendering of a manufactured environment that could exist in space in the future.
His speech felt akin to the talk SpaceX founder Elon Musk delivered at an international space conference in 2016. Mexico City is where Musk first unveiled a design for a super-large rocket and starship, as well as his plans for millions of humans to live on Mars and make a vibrant world there.
But their visions also differ dramatically. Musk wants to turn Mars green and vibrant to make humanity a multi-planet species and provide a backup plan in case of calamity on Earth. Bezos wants to preserve Earth at all costs. "There is no Plan B," the founder of Amazon said Thursday.
Other worlds in the Solar System lack Earth's atmosphere and gravity. At most, they could support perhaps a few billion people, Bezos said. The answer is not other planets or moons, he said, but rather artificial worlds or colonies in space known as O'Neill cylinders.
Building off of a concept introduced decades ago by physicist Gerard O'Neill – who Bezos himself studied under during his time at Princeton. The habitats are designed to be self-sustaining and could, that could, one day, hold entire cities, agricultural areas, even national parks in space. Possibly allowing trillions of people to live in off-world colonies.
In 1974, Princeton physicist Gerard K. O’Neill proposed the idea of rotating pairs of cylinders mimicking Earth conditions while orbiting in space. While the idea may have seemed a bit far-fetched, O’Neill himself was certainly well-known and respected.
But in the 1974 landmark paper for Physics Today, O'Neill laid out the science and calculations for building habitats “far more comfortable, productive and attractive” than Earth. Initially, described O’Neill, his dive into the world of space habitats was “almost as a joke... but had to be taken more seriously when the numbers began to come out right.” He also prefaces that all of calculations are based on known 1970s technology and predicts that they could be conservative based on a century’s worth of technological and engineering advancement.
“These are very large structures, miles on end. They would hold a million people or more each,” explained Bezos to a quiet audience made up of supporters, media, and elementary school robotic students.
Bezos believes the self-sustaining colonies will be able to support trillions of people (Blue Origin)
The habitats, reminiscent of the film Interstellar, could be built close enough to Earth to allow people to travel back and forth, and house ‘a million people or more each.’ And, according to Bezos, they’d have the ‘ideal climate’ at all times, ‘like Maui on its best day, all year long.’
An artist's rendering of a space habitat that Jeff Bezos presented onstage for Blue Origin. The Geisel Library at the University of California, San Diego, can be seen at right, and a city that resembles Seattle appears in the background. (Blue Origin)
We have seen bits and pieces of Bezos' vision to use the resources of space to save Earth and make it a garden for humans before. But this is the first time he has stitched it together in such a comprehensive and radical narrative, starting with reusable rockets and ending with gargantuan, cylindrical habitats in space where millions of people could live. This was the moment when Bezos finally pulled back the curtain, in totality, to reveal his true ambitions for spaceflight. This is where he would like to see future generations one day live.
These cities may replicate cities on Earth, such as that pictured above, or start from scratch with their own futuristic architecture, Florence in space, with the Forbidden City visible in the distance. (Blue Origin)
“We get to choose, do we want stasis and rationing, or do we want dynamism and growth? This is an easy choice. We know what, we want we just have to get busy."
While acknowledging that this reality is extremely far off, Bezos set out his Utopian vision. Humans will live peacefully together among the stars in these contained O’Neill colonies rather than spreading to inhospitable worlds like Mars.
‘If we’re out in the solar system, we can have a trillion humans in the solar system – which means we’d have a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins. This would be an incredible civilisation.’