Gif : Blue Origin Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, the wealthiest man on the planet, gave an hour-long presentation yesterday about his plans for humanity’s future living on the moon and in space colonies. It was a bit like watching a monologue from a sci-fi movie in a lot of ways. And now you can finally view the entire presentation online for yourself. Advertisement Fellow billionaire Elon Musk generally makes a point of offering a live video stream whenever he announces something important and futuristic like this. But Bezos and his space company Blue Origin didn’t post a video of yesterday’s event until the middle of the night. It’s a fascinating talk, but maybe livestream the thing next time, Jeff? This is the future we’re talking about, after all. The entire presentation has been uploaded to YouTube and we have a TLDR (or TLDW?) version below, complete with screenshots and animated GIFs. Bezos started his presentation by saying that the “Earth is the best planet” and presenting quotes from people like the late astronomer Carl Sagan. Bezos stressed that as humans we can both “work on the here and now” and “get started on the large scale problems.” Bezos claimed that “we will run out of energy on Earth” and that “this is just arithmetic.” Bezos says that humanity’s energy use is unsustainable. Bezos says that we can focus on energy efficiency but that the problem with that idea is that “it’s already assumed.” Bezos laid out various examples of improved efficiency, from the amount of work that was required 200 years ago to create artificial light, to the amount of fuel that was required to get one human around in an airplane. Advertisement Screenshot : Blue Origin “What happens when unlimited demand meets finite resources? The answer is incredibly simple: Rationing,” said Bezos. Advertisement “The good news is that if we move out into the solar system, for all practical purposes, we’d have unlimited resources,” said Bezos. Screenshot : Blue Origin Advertisement “So, we get to choose. Do we want stasis and rationing or do we want dynamism and growth?” said Bezos. “This is an easy choice. We know what we want, we just have to get busy.” Bezos goes on to say that if humanity moves out into the solar system we could have “a trillion humans” which means “we could have a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins.” Bezos never really explains what he means by that, but it sure sounds good! Advertisement Screenshot : Blue Origin Bezos then introduced the audience to the ideas of Gerard O’Neill, the late physicist and a big proponent of building artificial habitats in space. Advertisement Bezos said that a scenario in which humans live on other planetary surfaces isn’t ideal since places like Mars are a great distance away, don’t have Earth-like gravity, and aren’t that big. Screenshot : Blue Origin Advertisement “What O’Neill and his students came up with, was the idea of manufactured worlds, rotated to create centrifugal force,” Bezos said. Gif : Blue Origin Advertisement Bezos says that these artificial space habitats would be many miles long and hold a million or more people each. “This is a very different colony” than the International Space Station. Bezos said that his new space colonies would have “high-speed transport, agricultural areas,” and says that “we added a little drone there” while showing the animated video of his space colony idea. Advertisement Gif : Blue Origin “Some of them would be more recreation,” Bezos said while an image of a space colony filled with wildlife appeared on the presentation screen. Advertisement Gif : Blue Origin “These are really pleasant places to live,” said Bezos. “Some of these O’Neill colonies might choose to replicate Earth cities. They might pick historical cities and mimic them in some way.” Advertisement Gif : Blue Origin “There’d be whole new kinds of architecture,” said Bezos. “These are ideal climates. These are shirt-sleeve environments.” Advertisement “This is Maui on its best day, all year long. No rain, no storm, no earthquakes. What does the architecture even look like when it no longer has its primary purpose of shelter? We’ll find out.” Gif : Blue Origin Advertisement Bezos then played a clip of an interview from 1975 with Isaac Asimov and Gerard K. O’Neill. Bezos goes on to say that with his space colonies not far from Earth, our home planet will be “zoned residential and light industry.” Advertisement Heavy industry and “all the things polluting our planet” will be done off Earth, Bezos explains. “There is no Plan B. We have to save this planet,” Bezos said in the middle of his presentation that was ostensibly about a Plan B. Advertisement Screenshot : Blue Origin Bezos said “this is going to take a long time, this is a big vision” while acknowledging that “the price of admission to do interesting things in space right now is just too high.” Advertisement “There’s no infrastructure” for space travel Bezos said while elaborating that if Amazon had needed to build the U.S. Postal Service it wouldn’t have been able to work and Amazon would have had to invest billions of dollars to get off the ground. Bezos also explains that they didn’t have to invent payment systems like credit cards, which are also part of the infrastructure that has allowed Amazon to succeed. Advertisement Screenshot : Blue Origin “Infrastructure lets entrepreneurs do amazing things,” said Bezos. “The kids here, and your children, and their grandchildren, you’re going to build the O’Neill colonies. This generation’s job, my generation’s job is to build the infrastructure so that you’ll be able to,” said Bezos. “We’re going to build a road to space and then amazing things will happen.” Advertisement Bezos says that there are two important things that are required to get humanity living in space. First, there needs to be a radical launch cost reduction, and second, there needs to be an exploitation of in-space resources since it’s incredibly expensive to move things from Earth into space. Gif : Blue Origin Advertisement Bezos then went into a pitch on his reusable spacecraft like the New Shepard from Blue Origin. The New Shepard is a suborbital vehicle designed for space tourism. Gif : Blue Origin Advertisement “We’re going to be flying humans using the New Shepard this year,” said Bezos. “That’s incredibly exciting.” Gif : Blue Origin Advertisement “New Shepard is powered by liquid hydrogen. It’s the highest performing rocket fuel, but it’s also the most difficult to work with,” Bezos said. “And it’s not needed for a suborbital mission. So why did we choose it? Because we knew we were gonna need it for the next stage and we wanted to get practice with that hardest-to-use but highest performing propellant.” Advertisement Bezos said that it was the same reason they developed vertical landing for the New Shepard. “I can’t wait to start sending humans up in New Shepard later this year. It’s a big deal.” Advertisement Bezos said that he often gets asked what things will change 10 years from now but that the “more important question” is what won’t change. Nobody thinks that customers are going to be asking for higher prices of Amazon 10 years from now, and he said that similar things apply to the space industry. Advertisement Gif : Blue Origin Bezos explained that the first stage of the New Glenn is designed to be reused 25 times and has a 7-meter fairing. Advertisement The New Glenn will lift 45 metric tons to lower earth orbit (LEO) and 13 metric tons to geosynchronous transfer orbit (GTO). Gif : Blue Origin Advertisement “It’s designed for human rating right from the very beginning,” said Bezos of the New Glenn. “We’ll fly it in 2021 for the first time.” Bezos touted the fact that New Glenn uses an inexpensive fuel saying that “the cost to fuel New Glenn is less than a million dollars.” Advertisement “The reason that launching things into orbit is so expensive today is because you throw the hardware away,” said Bezos. “It’s like driving your car to the mall and then throwing it away after one trip.”<doc-sep>Colonizing planets has many attractions. However, it also has a variety of associated problems. First, colonizing planets in the solar system would require people to live in enclosed spaces within extraordinarily hostile environments. Mars would be a very unpleasant place to live. So why not just live in an enclosed space? Second, planets are at the bottom of gravity wells, which make them poorly suited to serving as bases for further exploration (without as yet undeveloped technologies such as space elevators). Finally, from an engineering perspective, planets are inefficient habitats: Living creatures inhabit the planet’s surface (or are relatively close to it, with the possible exception of some extremophile microorganisms), making little use of the rest of the planet. It is easy to envisage alternative structures that would have a more efficient ratio of surface to mass, including O’Neill cylinders and (depending on exotic physics) more speculative megastructures.<doc-sep>This past week, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos laid out his vision for the future of humanity’s presence in space. The richest man on the planet (on paper, at least) spent about an hour talking about how and why he believes we should someday develop massive free-floating space structures that can house millions of people off-world. And then he made the case for how his company Blue Origin will build the infrastructure required to make those big dreams come true. That all starts with the rockets Blue Origin is building, but it also now includes Blue Moon, the lunar lander Bezos unveiled on Thursday. Blue Moon is what his company will use to someday deliver science equipment and humans to the surface of the Moon. It can soft land between 3.6 and 6.5 metric tons on the lunar surface, and it’s likely to be a key part of the company’s desire to mine for water ice at the Moon’s poles. Bezos has spoken publicly about his grand vision for colonizing space (and how it differs from, say, Elon Musk’s) before, most notably at the 2016 Code Conference. But at this week’s event, he offered a more focused and detailed explanation on the reasons why he believes we should take on this massive endeavor. A major one is that Earth has finite resources, especially energy, he argued. Space, on the other hand, offers the promise of unlimited resources. All we need is cheaper, more reliable access, according to Bezos. Not everyone agrees with those claims. Some believe we could eventually exhaust the solar system’s resources just like we are on track to do here on Earth. There’s also a very good argument to be made about how we haven’t yet figured out how to live sustainably on this planet, and that we should figure out that massive problem before we create new ones for our species. He’s also basing his vision on extremely capitalist ideals (like limitless growth) at a time when some of those ideals are regularly being called into question by high-profile members of the US government, let alone some of its citizens. This wasn’t the first time we’ve heard Bezos’s view of the far-out future, but it was the first time we’ve seen him lay it out on his own terms in such a public manner. It also won’t be the last we’ll hear of it. Bezos is likely to recycle parts of this speech as we get closer to some of Blue Origin’s biggest milestone events, like the first launch of its mega-rocket New Glenn in 2021 or any attempt it makes at trying to send Blue Moon to the lunar surface. In many ways, it’s a commercial directed at NASA, one we’re probably going to see play on a loop until the space agency decides whether to use Blue Origin’s tech in its own attempt to get back to the Moon by 2024. In other words, it raises a lot of questions that we’re all likely to spend the next few years debating.<doc-sep>
Jeff Bezos, in a presentation for his company Blue Origin this week, detailed his ambitions to put up to 1 trillion people in space in O'Neill colonies: spinning cylinders meant to replicate gravity, orbit the Earth, and sustain human life. "This is Maui on its best day, all year long," he said, according to The Guardian. "No rain. No earthquakes. People are going to want to live here." The Princeton physicist Gerard O'Neill came up with the idea in 1976, when he said other planets might not be the best place for humans to live away from Earth. Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories. Jeff Bezos on Thursday restated his ambition to build floating space colonies where people could stay in orbit in excellent climates, with weather like "Maui on its best day, all year long." The Amazon founder made the comments at a press conference in Washington, DC, where he unveiled the Blue Moon lander, a giant vehicle designed to deliver payloads — and perhaps astronauts one day — to the surface of the moon. The lander, created by Bezos' privately held rocket company, Blue Origin, aims to help establish "sustained human presence" on the moon, Business Insider's Dave Mosher reported from the event. Bezos also branched out into his far-flung ambitions to put up to 1 trillion people in space with O'Neill cylinders, a hypothetical technology meant to sustain human life. An artist's concept of an O'Neill space colony. Blue Origin The spinning cylinders are designed to replicate gravity, orbit the Earth, and give people and plants a place to live. Bezos described the O'Neill colonies as having "high-speed transport," "agricultural areas," and "cities in the background," with some designed for recreation. "They don't all have to have the same gravity," he said. "You could have a recreational one that keeps zero Gs so that you could go flying with your own wings. Some would be national parks." An artist's concept of an O'Neill space colony, which could mimic a national park. Blue Origin The cylinders are named after the Princeton physicist Gerard O'Neill, who in 1976 suggested that other planets might not be the best place for humans to live away from Earth. According to Bezos' plan, living in those space colonies would be as easy and temperate as living in Hawaii. "This is Maui on its best day, all year long," he said, according to The Guardian. "No rain. No earthquakes. People are going to want to live here." Bezos said he envisioned some of the colonies replicating cities on Earth. "They might pick historical cities and mimic them in some way," he said. An artist's concept of an O'Neill space colony, which could copy cities on Earth. Blue Origin Some of them might even have a futuristic bent. "There would be whole new kinds of architecture," Bezos said, adding that "these are ideal climates." He continued: "What does the architecture even look like when it no longer has its primary purpose of shelter? We'll find out. These are beautiful. People are going to want to live here. And they can be close to Earth, so that you can return." An artist's concept of an O'Neill space colony with innovative architecture. Blue Origin He noted that O'Neill colonies would have to be constructed by future generations, as the technology does not exist. But he pledged to start building the infrastructure now, starting with the Blue Moon lander. Bezos in 2016 floated the idea of putting millions of people in O'Neill cylinders and is said to have discussed it while studying at Princeton in the 1980s, according to GeekWire. He also discussed the idea at a talk last year with Axel Springer, Business Insider's parent company. According to the Financial Times, Bezos said on Thursday that "if we move out into the solar system, for all practical purposes, we will have unlimited resources."