
Jeff Bezos: I spend my billions on space because we’re destroying Earth - Biba89
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/17/why-jeff-bezos-spends-billions-on-space-technology.html
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erentz
This kind of thing is motivated reasoning. Elon is guilty of it too. They want
to play with space technology, then go searching for moral justifications that
don’t add up.

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.

~~~
chillacy
There are definitely a lot of people finding moral justification for their
lifestyles.

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.

~~~
malandrew
seeing as we evolved from animals that don't appear to experience guilt about
eating other animals, I find it implausible that feeling guilt is the original
state and not a pro-social trait that evolved much much later as we started
forming societies.

~~~
chillacy
That’s correct, guilt would be something that evolves with social structure,
but social structure arose pre-hunter-gatherer. The jump to agriculture took
hundreds of thousands of years after the first hominids (pre sapiens).

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dsaavy
Warning: Opinion

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.

~~~
dlivingston
I would argue that it's the fault of the consumer, _not_ Amazon. Amazon simply
provides a centralized place to 'consume' \- it does not (in most cases)
manufacture goods, it simply consolidates goods into one place.

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?

~~~
gowld
Jevon's Paradox explains the issue: lower price -> more consumption.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox)

~~~
dsaavy
Haven’t heard of this before, thanks for the share!

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mikepurvis
Pretty ironic for this to land on Prime day, literally an orgy of splurging on
underpriced cheap junk to be next-day shipped in brown cardboard boxes right
to everyone's door.

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cutler
Yeah, right. So we can't afford to feed, house and cloth a large percentage of
the world's population yet we're somehow going to send them all into space?#@%
Sorry, does not compute. As far as I'm aware no-one has discovered oxygen on
either the Moon or Mars so, again, does not compute.

~~~
hnaccy
The goal isn't to save "a large percentage of the world's population"...

~~~
root_axis
Well that logic doesn't make much sense either; a vagrant's life on the street
will be a lot more comfortable than a billionaire living in space for the
foreseeable future.

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akeck
Silver bullet solution to a lead bullet problem.

[https://a16z.com/2011/11/13/lead-bullets/](https://a16z.com/2011/11/13/lead-
bullets/)

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kpU8efre7r
Bezos- you're part of the consumerist world-raping for profit problem.

~~~
mruts
And you're not?

~~~
Can_Not
Let's not equivocate the man with the most power to do something with a random
HN commenter who nearly has the least power to do something.

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elkos
I'm biased but I would think that if someone chooses to invest on space on it
would make sense to reach out and assist non-profits that work on developing
open space technologies too.

Disclaimer: I'm part of one such organisation

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DangerChips
The future can't come fast enough. Resource extraction being off-world would
be a huge boon environmentally and I can't think of a better use of resources
to help preserve our species.

~~~
aylmao
I'm less worried about resource extraction, and more worried about pollution.
Sure, mining pollutes and we have a limited number of minerals in the world.

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?

~~~
cableshaft
>Trees are being cut faster than they are planted

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...](https://www.nasa.gov/feature/ames/human-activity-in-china-and-india-
dominates-the-greening-of-earth-nasa-study-shows)

~~~
aylmao
Amazing news! Thanks for sharing.

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aussiegreenie
What load of junk.

If he is worried about saving the Earth. For the price of a single rocket, he
could seriously change the politics of Climate Change.

~~~
chillacy
We could have fed people instead of doing the Apollo program, or building
luxury condos, or producing a blockbuster movie. There’s always a holier than
thou cause out there.

~~~
Tiktaalik
Yes we should have fed people instead of doing all those things.

~~~
chillacy
Are you going to lead by example? You could have sold your laptop and spent
your internet bill to feed hungry people.

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Mc_Big_G
Is it not obvious that surviving in space or the moon or mars is infinitely
more difficult than just changing our ways? Bezos has been consumed by his own
bubble of existence. He fantasizes about a world where only he can afford to
exist, assuming I guess that he'll achieve immortality. The earth would be
better off with him not on it.

~~~
mruts
Amazon in the second most admired company (behind Apple) according to
forbes[1]. So I think it's safe to say that almost everyone disagrees with
you.

[1][https://fortune.com/worlds-most-admired-
companies/](https://fortune.com/worlds-most-admired-companies/)

~~~
JohnFen
> it's safe to say that almost everyone disagrees with you.

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.

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bilbyx
So we can go and destroy another planet? Better to invest billions in
teraforming tech and cleanup on Earth. This will benefit all and not just the
rich. I also wonder how much carbon emission building and sending rockets to
space produces.

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bronzeage
with the way the rocket equation works (fuel is always a fixed percentage of
the payload), I'm very doubtful there will ever be an economic incentive to
mine materials in space, or manufacture anything without a huge price / weight
ratio. space is not really an option, we've got only one place and people like
bezos will ruin it while pretending there's a plan b.

