Blue Origin founder and billionaire Jeff Bezos presented his vision for humanity’s future in the solar system.
“I think we’re very like-minded on a lot of these efforts,” Bezos said at a news conference episode from the Lex Fridman podcast. He added, “I don’t know Elon that well,” but he said he liked the idea of starting a friendship with him.
When asked what he hoped for humanity’s future in space hundreds or thousands of years from now, he replied:
“I would like to see a trillion people living in the solar system. If we had a trillion people, we would have a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins at any given moment… Our solar system would be full of life, intelligence and energy.”
What companies like Blue Origin and SpaceX are doing, he said, is creating the space infrastructure on which future generations can build bigger things.
“When I started Amazon, I didn’t have to develop a payment system. It already existed. It was called the credit card,” he said.
“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 his shoulders.”
Bezos said he wanted to use his “Amazon profits” to build heavy infrastructure that will be used by the space entrepreneurs of future generations.
“If you can get a really valuable space company started in a college dorm room, then we know we’ve built enough infrastructure for ingenuity and imagination to really run wild,” he said. “I find that very exciting.”
He envisions humans living in giant space stations, which have “many advantages over planetary surfaces,” including the ability to spin them to create normal gravity. He said most people would want to live close to Earth and vacation there, “the same way you would go to Yellowstone National Park.”
