BEZOS: WE'LL ALL LIVE IN OUTERSPACE...

Jeff Bezos plays down AI dangers and says one trillion humans could live in huge cylindrical space stations 

Artificial intelligence is more likely to save humanity than to destroy it, Jeff Bezos said recently. The billionaire also said he would like to see the human population grow to one trillion, with most people living in huge cylindrical space stations. In an interview with podcaster Lex Fridman, the Amazon founder and former CEO rejected the idea that humans should colonize other planets, saying he believes building space colonies is the only way to achieve such population growth. “I would love to see a trillion humans living in the solar system. If we had a trillion humans, we would have, at any given time, 1,000 Mozarts and 1,000 Einsteins,” he said. “The only way to get to that vision is with giant space stations. The planetary surfaces are just way too small.” Bezos, who has a net worth of $172 billion, said that if people lived on O’Neill space colonies near Earth, built using raw materials from the moon and objects in the asteroid belt, they could visit our current planet on vacation. The concept of O’Neill colonies was developed by science-fiction writer Gerard K. O’Neill as a solution to the problem of livable environments in space. The space stations, designed as two cylinders that rotate around an axis, would offer an artificial Earth-like environment and use rotation to simulate gravity. Bezos’s vision is in opposition to that put forward by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who is currently the richest person in the world. Musk has said that he hopes that humans will become a “multiplanetary species” and that he aims to colonize Mars via his company SpaceX. In Bezos’s vision, space colonies would help support a population that is 125 times the size of the Earth’s current population. He said people would be free to choose whether or not to live in space, but those who opted for the O’Neill colonies would “’be able to use much more energy and much more material resources in space than they would be able to use on Earth.” Bezos said people living in space would still have the opportunity to travel to Earth on vacation, in the “same way that you might go to Yellowstone National Park.” He acknowledged that he “won’t live long enough to see the fruits” of his efforts to colonize space, saying that the personal rewards of his work with space company Blue Origin “come from building a road to space.” Source