Jeff Bezos Unveils Blue Origin’s Vision for Space, and a Moon Lander | Hacker News Reader

Jeff Bezos Unveils Blue Origin’s Vision for Space, and a Moon Lander

nytimes.com

22 pointspseudolus17 comments

See also discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19872439

> Rising energy consumption is crucial to raising the standard of living for more people, but “We will run out of energy,” Mr. Bezos said. “This is just arithmetic. It’s going to happen.”

Really? It's GOING to happen?

Unless I'm woefully mistaken, this is only the case if we define energy as meaning "fossil fuels". In that case, yeah, we're absolutely going to run out of those.

But nuclear, wind, solar, hydro, thermal? These are going to run out? Why? On what timeline?

> Unless I'm woefully mistaken, this is only the case if we define energy as meaning "fossil fuels". In that case, yeah, we're absolutely going to run out of those.

I'm sorry to disagree but this is false. I don't have the time to come up with multiple sources, but we'll never ever run out of coal, oil or gas [0].

Additionally, from the sources of news that I get. Every year they seem to find newer deposits of oil and gas [1].

Now throw in the fact that in the next 25 years the majority of transportation on the road will be electric and then in the air the next 25-50 years after that. Demand will simply plummet.

Finally there are even startups who are working on turning bio-waste into plastics, thus in the future lowering the demand significantly [2].

I would bet by 2100. We still have plenty of oil, gas, coal and other minerals and because of advancements and access to space mining. That the world doesn't ever run out, due to demand moving onto other eco-friendly alternatives and will have an over abundance of everything. The world will do just fine.

[0]: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/oila...

[1]: https://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Significant-natural-gas-di...

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBSzxQLQSpI

Looks awfully a lot like the visions of outer space from the 70s. And space is a lot less hospitable than some underground cavern on Mars or the Moon.

Which themselves are less hospitable than living in the middle of the Sahara desert.

These billionaires have quite the pet projects to envy.

I was going to give Jeff flack, but he is doing philanthropy.

What else can we ask of the worlds billionaires? Advancing tech, reducing poverty.

I stepped over human feces yet again this morning, how about some infrastructure to deal with that? "Incredible civilization" you say? For who?

I get your point but if you look at the number of technologies over the second half of the XX century that spanned from research on planes and space, it is still indirectly beneficial for us mere earth people.

Which technologies? Teflon? Tang? Now that we have more and more of our country living either in prisons or under bridges than at any point in time, which of these amazing space technologies will most benefit the prison population/mentally ill the most?

First result on google and if you include planes I am sure there are many more:

https://spinoff.nasa.gov/Spinoff2008/tech_benefits.html

Are you proposing technology that eliminates the need for humans to defecate?

Sounds like a very interesting idea for a startup to solve. I will still find Blue Origin a bit more interesting though.

There are very close to zero human feces to step over in space (yet), so maybe this is of your interest?

Perhaps talk to your local politicians about that. I'm not sure why Bezos should be responsible for that.

I’m not sure how you expect Bezos to solve mental illness and drug addiction.

It's not enough that the human race is in the process of destroying the earth. It also wants to destroy space!

The only thing that's incredible about "civilizations" is that they're incredibly bad.

This sounds a lot like the old fallacy of, “don’t try to advance spaceflight until humanity has solved all of its problems on Earth”. Problem there is, we’re never going to solve all of our problems on Earth, so if we hold ourselves to that, we’re just going to get caught in a stagnant loop which could ironically lead to less of said problems being solved.

Humanity works best when we have many projects running in parallel. Rocket propulsion engineers and civil engineers do very different things and it’s not going to help anybody if the former gets shoehorned into the job of the latter.

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