View Full Version : Rob Greenfield vs Jeff Bezos
I could have put this in a few forums but I chose Environmental Issues. Rob Greenfield's YouTube (see below) points out a bunch of different simple living truths, and I really enjoyed this video. Anyone into frugality, the environment, minimalism, will probably find some value in this TEDtalk.
"As I made these changes, I thought I was making environmentally-friendly changes, which I was. But what I found was, every time I did something good for the environment, I was doing something good for me--so with making these changes I was becoming happier and healthier."
Just recently I read about Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and their desire to set the foundation for being able to actually live in space. Why? Because it will provide an escape from a polluted planet.
"Our ultimate vision is millions of people living and working in space," Bezos said during a rare, 30-minute conversation with reporters after the announcement in Cape Canaveral, Fla.
Musk, the Los Angeles entrepreneur who founded SpaceX, envisions a "multi-planet species" that will escape Earth's suffocating pollution to live, for starters, on Mars — after nuking the red planet to warm it up, as he recently told "Late Show" host Stephen Colbert. (To delay the pending environmental collapse, Musk prescribes electric cars and solar panels — from his other two companies.)"
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So, trash the home you have, and then try to adapt to homes that are not friendly to your biological needs without the support of a LOT of technology.
Which scenario is more likely: that people will rethink their actions, a la Greenfield, or look for an escape in space, a la Bezos. I know that there are a bunch of people here who don't think either will be necessary--and hopefully there is a middle way. At this point in time, both seem to be extreme solutions, but if you accept that we are in the process of killing the planet, then it may become an either/or situation--and will it be Greenfield's solutions, or Bezos'?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhKevstJyrc
[QUOTE=catherine;272284]
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So, trash the home you have, and then try to adapt to homes that are not friendly to your biological needs without the support of a LOT of technology.
QUOTE]
This! Bezos is singlehandedly causing so much waste each day in form of packaging, and disrupting so much local commerce--really sad. That is monstrous, to have such an impact and suggest that rich people go live in space.
Williamsmith
7-3-17, 11:11am
I actually think the opposite. We are in the process of improving our planet, building it up, supporting it in its ability to heal itself. Elon Musk is a techno science PT Barnum and Rob Greenfield is more of an artist than an environmentalist. Musk out of sheer willpower and financial resource, may someday establish a fledgling community on Mars but there will never be a need for it. The Earth will always remain. Billions of Humans however......may not.
ApatheticNoMore
7-3-17, 12:00pm
a few rich people think they will live on mars while the earth and billions of people on it (plus other species) die in mass environmental holocaust.
Of course in actuality, this is almost certainly a delusion, maybe not the billions of people dying, that could happen, but the living on another planet etc. since there are many many reasons people are not adapted to other planets at all. I'm not sure how widespread the delusion really is, seems mostly to afflict a few people with way more money than brains not to mention decency. Some people want to explore space for more positive reasons of course, but for that to make any sense you do so in a context of also trying to save this planet.
Ugh makes me feel guilty for the few things I bought from Whole Foods recently (I mostly have not - ever since it was bought by Amazon!). The Rob Greenfield stuff might be interesting if I have some time ..
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.
Williamsmith
7-3-17, 12:40pm
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.
Are you conceiving of a mere Noah type experience in space or is this going to be a mass exodus? I'm having trouble getting a grip on this intellectually.
Hawking seems to agree with the uninhabitable earth theory. (But he's just a scientist, which is just a little better than a journalist among some these days.)
"It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster on planet Earth in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand, or million. The human race shouldn't have all its eggs in one basket, or on one planet. Let's hope we can avoid dropping the basket until we have spread the load."
http://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/05/stephen-hawking-human-extinction-colonize-planet.html
Hawking seems to agree with the uninhabitable earth theory. (But he's just a scientist, which is just a little better than a journalist among some these days.)
"It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster on planet Earth in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand, or million. The human race shouldn't have all its eggs in one basket, or on one planet. Let's hope we can avoid dropping the basket until we have spread the load."
That's right! I forgot Hawking is in the "let's bail" camp.
Williamsmith
7-3-17, 12:55pm
That's right! I forgot Hawking is in the "let's bail" camp.
Forgive me but as Catherine pointed out in the OP.......what kind of ethic is it to trash the one planet we have and seek to move on to another planet. Why would we not assume that it will be trashed as well? And for Gods sake, if we have the technology to move the entire human race to another planet or galaxy......you would think we could just make some repairs here and be happy with the remodeled home.
Are you conceiving of a mere Noah type experience in space or is this going to be a mass exodus? I'm having trouble getting a grip on this intellectually.
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.
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/business/economy/jeff-bezos-pulls-back-the-curtain-on-his-plans-for-space/2016/03/09/a0716c7e-e5f4-11e5-a6f3-21ccdbc5f74e_story.html?utm_term=.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-puts-his-case-for-a-multi-planet-civilisation
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
7-3-17, 1:45pm
"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
7-3-17, 3:22pm
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?
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.
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.
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/Cretaceous%E2%80%93Paleogene_extinction_event
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. :cool:
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.
One thing that narrowly missed most of us a few days ago was a celebration of Asteroid Day.
https://www.space.com/37327-asteroid-day-2017-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.
"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.
That's a relief! :D
bicyclist
11-13-18, 6:23pm
Sorry that I am so late in discovering this thread but I can remember watching the astronauts walking on the Moon and there are still no places to live up there let anhy other planet! Jeff and Elan better hurry if they expect to take residence on another planet.
iris lilies
11-13-18, 7:41pm
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.
Do you think the long term survival of our species is important? If so, why?
catherine
11-13-18, 9:08pm
Do you think the long term survival of our species is important? If so, why?
Maybe the limited survival of our species is essential for the long-term survival of our planet.
But you pose a great question. If we go the way of the dodo bird, who cares?
I’m reading “life 3.0: being human in the age of artificial intelligence”. Which addresses this very question in great depth.
Do you think the long term survival of our species is important? If so, why?
Personally I assume that the long term survival of our species is probably a bad thing for the planet at large. The sooner we're gone the better for everything else.
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