We want extra people. That’s the message from two of the world’s richest billionaires, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
Whereas the 2 compete within the house enterprise—Bezos owns Blue Origin whereas Musk has SpaceX—they agree on sure facet’s of humanity’s future.
“I think in a lot of these endeavors we’re very like-minded,” Bezos stated on an episode of the Lex Fridman Podcast launched this week. He added, “I don’t really know Elon very well,” however he stated that he appreciated the concept of forming a friendship with him.
Requested what he hoped for humanity’s future in outer house a whole lot or 1000’s of years from now, he replied:
“I would love to see, you know, a trillion humans living in the solar system. If we had a trillion humans, we would have at any given time a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins…Our solar system would be full of life and intelligence and energy.”
What firms like Blue Origin and SpaceX are doing, he stated, is creating the house infrastructure upon which future generations can construct better issues.
“When I started Amazon, I didn’t have to develop a payment system. It already existed. It was called the credit card,” he stated. “I didn’t have to develop a transportation system to deliver the packages. It already existed. It was called the postal service and Royal Mail and Deutsche Post. And so all this heavy lifting infrastructure was already in place. And I could stand on its shoulders.”
He stated that he needed to make use of his “Amazon winnings” to construct heavy infrastructure that shall be utilized by the house entrepreneurs of future generations.
“When you can have a really valuable space company started in a dorm room, then we know that we’ve built enough infrastructure so that ingenuity and imagination can really be unleashed,” he stated. “I find that very exciting.”
He envisions folks residing in large house stations, which have “a lot of advantages over planetary surfaces,” together with the flexibility to spin them to create regular gravity. He stated most individuals would need to reside close to Earth and go there for trip, “the same way you might go to Yellowstone National Park.”
He sees the Earth’s atmosphere being preserved by heavy manufacturing transferring into house, benefiting from sources on the moon and the asteroid belt.
As for Musk, he’s lengthy confused the necessity for humanity to turn out to be a multi-planet species, and he envisions SpaceX’s Starship rockets transporting folks between Earth and Mars, the place a everlasting human presence shall be established.
“We don’t want to be one of those single planet species, we want to be a multi-planet species,” he stated in 2021 after SpaceX despatched astronauts into orbit on a reused rocket.
He’s additionally warned about an “underpopulation crisis” right here on Earth. In the summertime of 2022, he stated the declining beginning charges seen in many countries introduced “the biggest danger civilization faces by far.”
A number of years earlier he had warned, “The biggest problem the world will face in 20 years is population collapse.”
This weekend, he sounded comparable warnings whereas attending a political competition in Italy staged by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.
“It’s important to have children and create the new generation,” he advised attendees. “As simple as it sounds, if people do not have children there is no new generation.”
Earlier this yr, after China launched figures displaying a plummeting beginning price, Musk tweeted: “Population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming…mark these words.”