Rob Greenfield vs Jeff Bezos

[catherine]

Can you point to some credible report that Bezos and Musk's motivation for going into space is primarily so that rich people can escape a polluted planet?

Personally, I think that it is essential for the long-term survival of our species that we get off this planet.

I never said "rich person," but Bezos' plan includes ensuring that we spare the earth from pollution by making space the place where all the industry will occur.

"But Bezos’s solution is to “spread out into the solar system” to mine the “limitless” resources in space. All heavy industry would move into space, where there would be asteroid mining, and Earth would be preserved as if it were exclusively zoned “residential and light industrial,” he said, laughing.

“Sometime in the next few hundred years,” he said, “there will be a big inversion where we will realize that we shouldn’t be doing heavy industry on Earth for two reasons: One, it’s very polluting; and two, we don’t have access to enough energy here do it. It just won’t be practical.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/busin...=.60289fa4955b

Elon Musk's prediction of a future Armageddon is much less defined, that's true. It sounds like he believes annihilation can take many forms. https://aeon.co/essays/elon-musk-put...t-civilisation

[pinkytoe]

It's probably a good thing to keep on trying lots of different things here on Earth and out there too. For now though, it does seem like only people of wealth will be traveling to other planets.

[ApatheticNoMore]

"But Bezos’s solution is to “spread out into the solar system” to mine the “limitless” resources in space. All heavy industry would move into space, where there would be asteroid mining, and Earth would be preserved as if it were exclusively zoned “residential and light industrial,” he said, laughing.

but where would those resources be used? On earth? And then the more important question: where would they be disposed of? Because don't a lot of our problems actually amount to: where would things be disposed of? Fly them all to the moon landfill or something?

Assuming someone like Bezos who is fabulously wealthy, while his employees in Amazon warehouses work in near slavery conditions, is primarily concerned with the good of humanity is not credible. Stephen Hawking, I don't know.

[Williamsmith]

Our solar system is full of rocks, small-to-large. Now-and-then, a decent-sized one hits the earth, and the ecosystem gets significantly impacted. Many species cease to be. Generally the larger and more complex species.

It's just a matter of time before one hits us. I used to work with an effort to identify and track likely near-Earth-orbit objects and potential impactors. If you approach the problem from an actuarial point of view, it would be worth spending a significant amount of money each year to make progress on the problem - for less than the cost of producing a feature film *about* asteroid impacts, you could actually Do Something Useful....

Next time one of these hits us, I'd like for us to have some resiliency as a species. Which probably includes having population reserves outside the area of destruction.

Then of course there are the more boring threats - crazy dictators with nukes causing a larger-scale nuclear weapons exchange, some inept bio-researcher letting a nasty bug escape, a nanotech grey-goo boo-boo, a bad release of Microsoft Windows, that sort of thing.

Bae, I'm sure this has been dealt with in some science fiction book but assuming we can ramp up our monitoring of the solar system for future likely catastrophic meteor impact origins.....(we can't even do healthcare and public education right).... who is on the Schindlers list of people to be saved and how is that determined......? If I could recommend Greenfield over Bezos.......and could we please not have any WalMarts in space?

[Ultralight]

There ain't no saving this planet, as a nice place for humans and most other animals to live. Humans have wrecked the place. I am one of them.

Even living the way I do, it'd take 3 or 4 Earths to allow everyone to live like I do.

[JaneV2.0]

Call me an optimist, but hominids have been around for a millions of years, the climate has changed repeatedly, the planet's been bombarded by debris, and we're still here--so I doubt we'll all be wiped out any time soon.

But I appreciate a visionary approach, so if Bezos and Musk and others want to be asteroid miners, I say more power to them.

[bae]

Call me an optimist, but hominids have been around for a millions of years, the climate has changed repeatedly, the planet's been bombarded by debris, and we're still here--so I doubt we'll all be wiped out any time soon.

You might want to look at the scale of these events. Hominids have not yet been through one of the size I am mentioning....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretac...tinction_event

[JaneV2.0]

Anything could happen--polar shift, anyone? But I won't hold my breath. I suspect we all have more immediate matters to obsess over, anyway.
But someone has to worry about such things, i guess. It's just not going to be me.

[bae]

Anything could happen--polar shift, anyone?

"Polar shift" is a fringe theory lacking in any sort of substantiating data. The date we do have indicates, well, it's not something that happens other than in movies.

[Simone]

One thing that narrowly missed most of us a few days ago was a celebration of Asteroid Day.
https://www.space.com/37327-asteroid...17-events.html

This thread also put me in mind of my favorite disaster film, "Melancholia." The characters await the inevitable collision of another planet with ours. There is no where to run to, and nothing to be done.