Jeff Bezos is going to the Moon. Elon Musk is going to Mars. Unless something happens that deprives one or both of their fortunes, it’s very likely both will be successful. And that success will have a massive influence on the future, not just for the United States, but humanity.
Billionaires are shaping a future that explicitly fits their childhood dreams. Because they can. Whether you like it or not.
This week, Amazon founder and richest man on Earth, Jeff Bezos, detailed his plans for getting off the Earth and creating both a base on the Moon and floating cities in space. On technical merits alone, the project that Bezos introduced, now called Blue Moon, is fascinating and impressive. The lunar lander used in the Apollo missions was a delicate fretwork of the lightest-possible tubing, with walls no thicker than a few sheets of tinfoil—an absolute exercise in shaving every gram. But the lander that Bezos’ team has created is a two-story titan, an industrial beast ready to deliver tons of material to the Moon on a sprawling heavy-duty frame that includes not just the capacity to handle four large rovers at once, but a crane for delivering them to the surface.
Bezos plans to put these landers—and people—on the Moon within the next five years. And, no matter what is said about the rest of his presentation, it’s extremely possible he will do it. His company, Blue Origin, has been moving steadily forward with careful technical advances and an absolute focus on long term planning. NASA may have a budget and priorities that shift on the whims of the latest occupant of the White House and the needs to secure political support in Congress. Bezos … doesn’t have that issue. His company’s first rocket, New Shepard, will begin flying humans on suborbital jaunts this year. The massive New Glenn rocket that would carry the Blue Moon landers is expected to fly in less than two years. He very well could be on the Moon in five.
The presentation in which Bezos announced his plans for cities on the Moon, space stations the size of counties, and a “trillion person civilization” sprawled across the the Solar System has come in from considerable ribbing from the press. And it’s little wonder. One of the first things that becomes obvious when watching the presentations from either Bezos or fellow space-junkie billionaire Elon Musk is that they are miserable speakers. Awful. Musk comes off a bit better—a project manager who clearly knows what he wants, but gets distracted when attempting to relay it to teammates who don’t already have the vision in mind—but Bezos, in addition to doing an uncanny imitation of Every Actor Playing Lex Luthor Ever, comes off as an earnest sixth-grader explaining how his science fair project is going to save the world.Because that’s exactly the case. As both Musk and Bezos have carefully explained, building a civilization in space is their childhood dream. Having billions of dollars gives them the ability to act on these dreams. Your priorities may not match theirs … but they don’t care. Because they don’t have to.
In many ways, Bezos’ presentation on Blue Moon and his vision for a space-faring humanity mirrors a series of similar presentation that Musk as done over the years. The biggest difference between the two is simply details of rocket design, the targeted dead world for that first colony, and … a certain level of geeky indulgence. Musk’s drive to build an interplanetary species can come off as something of a cold calculation. Bezos’ presentation is the end game of a literal starry-eyed kid who sees the chance to not just talk about, but act on, every wish he’s ever had.
There’s a moment when Bezos shows on screen a high-school version of himself winning an award, and in the text of the attached article is teenage Bezos talking about saving the planet with a system of solar power satellites. His dream has not changed. Jeff Bezos is going to have his $#@%ing pony, dammit. Except that pony is going to be the future … maybe all of our future. Like it or not.
In his presentation, Bezos directly acknowledges that there are “immediate problems.” Little things like poverty, starvation, and devastation of the natural world. But then, under the auspices of the idea that there are also “long term problems” that require “long term planning,” he moves on to his idea of creating a Solar System spanning civilization with a population many times that of the one already burdening Earth that includes faux-Italian villas among the stars.
Bezos knows that poverty and starvation are issues. But … he is not interested in those issues. If that old newspaper clipping had explained how little Jeff Bezos had always dreamed of bringing food to everyone on the planet, his presentation this week might have been profoundly different. But then, a
pretty good argument might be made that a “feed the poor” Jeff Bezos might never have made the decisions that got him to the point where he could actualize his dream.
Bezos and Musk love the idea of spaceflight and creating a future in space. Love it. You can’t make them change that. The problem here isn’t just that billionaires are spending their money on things that they want. They are launching projects so vast they might literally define the future of the species. The real problems is that there are individuals with the kind of wealth and power to make that possible. The ultimate result of a system that channels all money into fewer and fewer hands, is that those hands make the decisions. Unchecked.
We have an economic system that allows individuals to secure the ability to make decisions for all of us, to profoundly alter the world and the future for generations. It’s not the first time. Previous generations of millionaires shaped transportation and communications in ways that defined where cities were built and how communities were formed. Millions of Americans, perhaps most, live where they live now because of decisions made by some railroad baron or industrial titan who defined the landscape a century ago.
Now billionaires are going further. And farther. What they’re doing is already altering the basic economics of access to space in ways that have only begun to impact everyday life. But the impacts will be profound. They will also be long lasting.
It’s easy to make fun of the nerdy exuberance of Bezos or the technocratic fervor of Musk, but they are genuinely on the edge of creating a future that is almost entirely under their control—a future that will greatly impact the future for everyone, everywhere.
Even if your own ideas of how things should be don’t involve sending so much as a pop bottle into orbit … you had better pay attention.
UPDATE Saturday, May 11, 2019 · 5:56:26 PM +00:00 · Mark Sumner
Paraphrasing a reply I made to AKALib downstream …
It’s interesting how differently people are taking different ideas from this piece. But I can’t say I’m not getting the exact conversation I was hoping to create by tackling this topic in this way. I appreciate the participation and the really broad dialog. A lot.
As has probably been clear to those who have noticed that I’ve made multiple trips to Florida just to watch Falcon 9s do their thing, and stood at the back of the room to watch a happy-but-sleepy Musk answer questions after the DEMO-1 mission, and interviewed NASA scientists, and generally gushed about space for years, and reported it all here in literally hundreds of articles … I love this stuff. To be honest, I love that Musk is doing this. I love that Bezos is doing this.
If I had a godzillion dollars, I would probably be doing the same thing—but with less skill and determination than either of them is showing.
With that said, I think it’s important to recognize that what they are doing is genuinely, seriously going to shape the future for everyone, even people who don’t go to Mars. Even people who hate the whole idea of space flight. It’s not “billionaires are flying away, good riddance!” It’s “billionaires are creating a whole new technological system that will, incidentally, create economic results that very well bring on trillionaires” as well as technological changes for everyone. I think it’s important to question the system that allows such concentration of wealth that individuals have the ability to take actions that have such a massive impact for good or ill.
Carry on. You’re doing a bang up job hitting this from all sides.
Jeff Bezos’ May 2019 introduction of the “Blue Moon” project to land humans on the Moon within five years and enable a lunar base.
Elon Musk’s 2017 presentation on “making life interplanetary” by creating a colony on Mars