An interesting interview. If you don’t want to RTWT, here is what he says about space:
Döpfner: Well, you are not flying airplanes, but you are sending rockets to the orbit. Could you share with us the vision of Blue Origin and the idea of space tourism with reusable rockets?
Bezos: Yes. This is super important to me, and I believe on the longest timeframe – and really here I’m thinking of a timeframe of a couple of hundred years, so over millions of decades – I believe and I get increasing conviction with every passing year, that Blue Origin, the space company, is the most important work that I’m doing. And so there is a whole plan for Blue Origin.
Döpfner: Really, so you’d say retail, e-commerce, clouds, publishing – that’s all less relevant than the space project.
Bezos: Yes, and I’ll tell you why. First of all, of course, I’m interested in space, because I’m passionate about it. I’ve been studying it and thinking about it since I was a five-year-old boy. But that is not why I’m pursuing this work. I’m pursuing this work, because I believe, if we don’t, we will eventually end up with a civilization of stasis, which I find very demoralizing. I don’t want my great-grandchildren’s great-grandchildren to live in a civilization of stasis. We all enjoy a dynamic civilization of growth and change. Let’s think about what powers that. We are not really energy-constrained. Let me give you just a couple of numbers. If you take your body – your metabolic rate as a human it’s just an animal, you eat food, that’s your metabolism – you burn about a 100 Watts. Your power, your body is the same as a 100-Watt lightbulb. We’re incredibly efficient. Your brain is about 60 Watts of that. Amazing. But if you extrapolate in developed countries where we use a lot of energy, on average in developed countries our civilizational metabolic rate is 11 000 Watts. So, in a natural state, where we’re animals, we’re only using a 100 Watts. In our actual developed-world state, we’re using 11 000 Watts. And it’s growing. For a century or more, it’s been compounding at a few percent a year – our energy usage as a civilization.
Now if you take baseline energy usage globally across the whole world and compound it at just a few percent a year for just a few hundred years, you have to cover the entire surface of the Earth in solar cells. That’s the real energy crisis. And it’s happening soon. And by soon, I mean within just a few 100 years. We don’t actually have that much time. So what can you do? Well, you can have a life of stasis, where you cap how much energy we get to use. You have to work only on efficiency. By the way, we’ve always been working on energy efficiency, and still we grow our energy usage. It’s not like we have been squandering energy. We have been getting better at using it with every passing decade. So, stasis would be very bad I think.
Now take the scenario, where you move out into the Solar System. The Solar System can easily support a trillion humans. And if we had a trillion humans, we would have a thousand Einsteins and a thousand Mozarts and unlimited (for all practical purposes) resources and solar power unlimited for all practical purposes. That’s the world that I want my great-grandchildren’s great-grandchildren to live in.
By the way, I believe that in that timeframe we will move all heavy industry off of Earth and Earth will be zoned residential and light industry. It will basically be a very beautiful planet. We have sent robotic probes to every planet in this solar system now and believe me this is the best one.
Döpfner: Jeff when can I buy the first ticket to do a little space tour.
Bezos: We are going to be… So the first tourism vehicle – we won’t be selling tickets yet – but we may put humans in it at the end of this year or at the beginning of next year. We are very close. We are building a very large orbital vehicle. We have been working on that for more than five years. It will fly for the first time in 2020. The key is reusability. This civilization I’m talking about of getting comfortable living and working in space and having millions of people and then billions of people and then finally a trillion people in space – you can’t do that with space vehicles that you use once and then throw away. It’s a ridiculous, costly way to get into space.
You don’t say. And yet NASA continues to waste billions on it each year.
[Sunday-morning update]
Congratulations to Bezos and Blue Origin for another successful test flight into space of New Shepard and the capsule today. Another milestone to first test passengers this year, then paying ones next year.
Space does have unlimited electrical power for trillions of people, but going to take awhile to get a trillion people.
I don’t think we need reusable rockets for leaving earth, though spacecraft in space have to be reusable.
What we need is markets in space, that is the key.
And easiest would be if the Moon has minable water, lunar poles need to be explored.
If have start by getting LOX from rock, it seems asteroids are better than the Moon.
So Earth’s quasi moons, and/or Mars moons.
I wonder if Venus has any quasi moons.
Mars could also be market and if could find large amounts shallow liquid groundwater, then that could be a good site for early Mars settlements.
Anyhow, it seems it’s mostly a matter of time, and the quicker the better, and it seems the idea of NASA having lunar bases, would a slower path, compared NASA merely exploring the lunar poles to find
commercially movable lunar water, and then exploring Mars to determine where to have human settlements.
NASA?
(Note to self: Watch Outland on Amazon.)
The world satellite market is about 200 billion dollar market. The U.S. taxpayer is giving NASA about 20 billion
dollars per year. NASA should doing stuff which increases the market size of space related activity- it should do thing which could help start new markets which add to the satellite market.
If NASA explores lunar poles, it could help start a lunar water market. Connected to lunar water market, would lunar rocket fuel market and rocket fuel sold in lunar orbit and other Earth orbits (and Mars orbits).
After determining if and where there is commercially minable lunar water, NASA should explore Mars, to discover if and where there could Mars settlements (commercial settlement or not government outposts, but
towns on Mars)
If there is commercially minable lunar water, the Moon could support many kinds of commercial and governmental activity. And the Moon could a gateway for Martian settlements. The Moon can also be gateway to other places, like Mercury.
Having lunar commercial activity and/or Mars settlements will directly lead to Earth getting Space Power Satellites (and infinite energy for Earth from Space).
And if NASA gets act together, this could all happen within several decades (less than a century).
But within couple decades the entire space market could be more than a trillion per year, and within 50 years tens of trillions per year.
Otherwise, it NASA continues waste explorations dollars, in 50 years, space markets might only be about 1 trillion per year.
So he’s basically saying his drones are going to put us all in pods that transmit Amazon Prime television into our brains while harvesting our bodies’ energy to power the Earth.
We are building a very large orbital vehicle.
How many people large?
How about taking NASA behind the barn and putting it out of its misery?
Replace with Office of Solar System Exploration (mostly JPL who seem to be good at that), a NACA like organisation doing technology research in aeronautics and spaceflight (National Aerospace Research Organisation – NARA) and if the US has any need for government astronauts they buy rides on commercial providers. No, the government does not dictate the design of such spacecraft.
GISS can go to NOAA with the rest of the warmunists, where it belongs.
This planet is suffering from a plague of government, which is my answer to the Fermi paradox – any sufficiently advanced civilization will develop a stifling bureaucracy, which prevents any further progress, before interstellar flight is developed.
There are some good signs out there. Even though everyone hates the LOP-G, it is using fixed price contracts and requires vendors fly their product before NASA makes a decision.
The other day we had the story about the lunar rover getting cancelled but also some vague tweets about how it might not be totally dead and that we aren’t going to have just one rover. It would be nice to see a rover program opened up to industry, where they provide fixed price services to NASA but also retain the ability to control and market their products to other customers.
With multiple sites that need prospecting, it is a great opportunity for many companies to participate. Surely most will succeed at meeting NASA’s requirements but how many will be able to find a market beyond NASA and what will that market look like?
The late, great Buckminster Fuller coined the term “Spaceship Earth.” However, I’ve always believed that was too constrained a view. Bezos is thinking in terms of Spaceship Solar System, which in my opinion is a better way to look at things. Barring the discovery of FTL capability, it’ll be a long time before humans are able to leave our solar system. However, the resources we have available in the solar system could meet humanity’s needs far into the future.
Draw a diagram of the solar system, it is hard to escape the similarities to a womb. All the nutrients are out there for us to grow and develop. Just another cosmic coincidence courtesy of nature, who gives us everything we need to thrive while simultaneously trying to murder us.
Earth itself can support a trillion people (with some heroic tech.)
How many does it take for off world population to qualify as significant? I would say less than is generally believed.
Often comparison is made to current or projected Earth population, as Bezos does, but that might be a misleading metric.
According to this handy video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUwmA3Q0_OE , the population of modern humans, currently at 7 billion, is expected to level off at 11 billion by year 2100. But during the vast majority of time that modern humans have existed that population was less than 1 million. And of course that population lived in geographically isolated breeding groups at that.
If and when the off-world self-sustaining population of humans reaches 1 million people (heck maybe even as low as 100,000 people) we can legitimately claim humanity is a multi-world species. No matter how teeming the Earth bound population is at the same time.
I think Bezos has absorbed Gerard O’Neill’s vision of the future. I’ve always believed putting humans at the bottom of a gravity well is pretty wasteful.