Jeff Bezos: I spend my billions on space because we’re destroying Earth
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
Anything we might do in space or to try to live on Mars is much-much (much) more difficult than fixing what problems we have on Earth to keep it healthy and habitable. These people would be better spending money here if they really cared.
Actually one of the more interesting ideas I heard is that this is how deist religions came about: early farmers had a tough time domesticating animals with animist religions (where each animal has a spirit and can be talked to) and so needed to remove the guilt that came with owning and slaughtering animals. By moving the spirit away from the animal directly and towards an animal god, they were able to absolve themselves of the guilt.
http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/08/why-explore-space.html
Perhaps the only thing that's changed since then is that the US spends far, far less on spaceflight.
It's not the nation's wealth. It's Bezos' and Musk's wealth. You and I didn't earn it.
Exchanging money is democratic. When I perform a service for someone else, they give me their votes in the form of dollars and then I can then give those votes in the form of dollars to someone else. Collectively we do this every single day.
Like the Bicameral Legislative, we have one democratic system with equal representation (the Senate) and another democratic system with proportional representation (the House). Likewise, individual citizens like states enjoy equal representation (one vote) and proportional representation (wealth) where the proportion of representation you get is dependent on how much cash others in society have voluntarily given you in exchange for something they find valuable.
Speak for yourself.
He's glossing over the short term, but I'm all for having diversity amongst billionaires. If two of them are obsessed with space, but more have philanthropic aims, them so be it.
I love the way Musk is planning a multi use rocket in the BFR, and the space colonies Bezos has envisaged, but I also hope that coal and natural gas use (and meat eating) can be reduced as soon as possible.
This sounds true upon first glance, but is it really? Scientifically/technologically speaking you're certainly correct, but fixing Earth is also a political problem.
I have much more faith in humanity's ability to create technology that saves Earth then I do to humanity's ability to put aside vested and/or selfish interests and work together for a common goal. The former is hopefully a matter of several (or more) generations, while the latter I imagine will never be "fixed."
I’m a little conflicted, Amazon as a company has enabled an even greater level of wasteful consumerism. Bezos seems to be trying to solve a problem he has helped accelerate.
I just don’t know how many other ways you can try to take on a mission like Blue Origin without building a massive fortune off of current unsustainable practices.
Kind of seems like digging a bigger hole and using profit off of dirt sales to fund an experimental dirt filling business.
Plus, how much impact could someone like Bezos have in the reversal of desertification and expansion of practices like permaculture? That would seem like a way to extend the timeline for space exploration while helping preserve what we currently have on Earth.
Let's flip your argument on its head.
If Amazon only had three customers, would they be enabling wasteful consumerism? If so, why? If so, wouldn't literally every online or offline marketplace be enabling wasteful consumerism?
If not, why? How many customers / year need to visit before they become the monster you claim? Or is it a gradient? If so, then what is their responsibility - to only let a certain threshold of people purchase goods every year, and turn the rest of consumers away?
If I, as a consumer, have $XXX disposable income, then I am going to spend it on A, B, and C. If Amazon lowers the prices of goods, then I am going to spend it on A, B, C, and D.
If Amazon, as a company, is interested in maximizing profits (which: duh), they are going to do that in one of two ways. Either they increase the cost of goods, leaving them less competitive to Walmart et al., or they increase their profit margins by minimizing other factors in the supply chain / company.
Both groups are behaving exactly as one would predict, and exactly how you or I would behave as consumers or as CEO of Amazon.
To say "it's everyone's fault" is ignoring the intrinsic human nature of consumers and the intrinsic Darwinian survival mechanisms via profit maximization of Amazon.
Pay taxes. Pay all employees a living wage. End toxic practices and policies. Don't undercut your sellers or engage in price fixing.
Disclaimer: I'm part of one such organisation
The bigger problem IMO is the destruction of the biosphere. Trees are being cut faster than they are planted, fish are being fished faster that they can reproduce, etc. There's no biosphere on asteroids.
Moreover, would finding another source for resources reduce the incentive to preserve the ones we have locally? For example, in the future, if plastics become scarce, plastic products will become more expensive and people will consume less of them.
Let's suppose we learn how to synthesize plastics from compounds found in asteroids. It would be business as usual, and the insane amount of pollution in landfills and oceans would only keep growing, would it not?
This part doesn't seem to be true anymore, thanks primarily to India and China (this popped up on Hacker News a couple of weeks ago, I think):
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/ames/human-activity-in-china-an...
If he is worried about saving the Earth. For the price of a single rocket, he could seriously change the politics of Climate Change.
That may or may not be true, but you can't tell from that Fortune link. It doesn't explain how that list was compiled, what counts as being "admired", and so forth. Without knowing that stuff, the list is meaningless.
I would speculate, though, that since this is Fortune magazine, the list is probably about who is the most admired by the business community (and skewed toward the community of larger businesses). If that's the case, then we're talking about the opinion of a relatively small segment of society and so it isn't representative of what "almost everyone" thinks.