“Jeff Bezos says the future is so bright, he doesn’t see how anybody can be discouraged who is alive right now… ‘In the next couple of decades, there will be millions of people living in space. That’s how fast this is going to accelerate,’ he said.” — Yahoo Tech
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If you’ve been lying awake worrying about creeping authoritarianism, economic collapse, or climate disasters, have you stopped to consider that in our lifetime, some small fraction of humanity may reside beyond Earth’s atmosphere?
I mean, picture it: By 2050, as global temperatures blow past the 1.5°C target set by the now-abandoned Paris Climate Accord, there may be millions of people living in space.
Sure, the human population will be ten billion people, and roughly ten billion of them will still be terrestrially bound to this planet in whatever condition our runaway catastrophes have left for them. Still, you have to admit that it sounds pretty cool, at least if you stick to astronauts and moon walks and not think too deeply about the realities of life in a metal box desperately trying to protect you from the inhospitable void, divorced from walking freely among Earth’s natural beauty, breathable air, and the sun’s warmth. Though those won’t exist here for long anyway, so might as well try to survive in zero Gs.
You may be thinking that the central problem the world faces is not the lack of settlements among the stars but the hoarding of wealth by a handful of man children who never learned to share; their imagination of progress begining with sci-fi fantasies of rocketships and mars colonies and ending before the inevitably dystopian second act while more salient and solvable issues like hunger, lack of shelter, and labor exploitation go unchecked.
But while the billionaires promising to launch humanity into the future are the very same who spent hundreds of millions of dollars funding an administration that’s gutting all manner of programs designed to make life livable here on Earth, they’re the only ones with the vision and resources to bring humankind to the cosmos. Because they also defunded NASA.
Feel hopeful in knowing that after strip-mining the only habitable world we have, they may build themselves a second one somewhere colder, lonelier, and even easier to keep away from the rest of us.
Unless you are one of the lucky millions to make it off world. In which case, if you thought today’s techno-feudalism was bad, just wait until no one can hear you scream.
