I had similar views until 5 years ago and questioned almost every new investment/endeavour by people that required significant upfront capital investment but I think this letter has changed a lot of my thinking process.
The future of space is going to involve a lot of robots, a lot of mining other planets for resources, and a lot of space stations made from those resources.
Bezos is planning for a future where all polluting industry is moved to outer space instead of being done here on Earth. He has publicly stated this on multiple occasions recently.
Highly doubtful …
> He has publicly stated this on multiple occasions recently.
He can say whatever he likes. I still don't trust that he cares about anything beyond amassing personal control of more money/resources.
And I don't think 50-70 miles is going to be the norm. This is more of a "test" flight, which is pretty normal. Everything has to start somewhere with a baby step.
It is going to be for the foreseeable future, and I'll tell you two reasons why:
1. FAA and USAF considers everyone that's been above 50 miles (~62 kilometres) as an astronaut.
2. Von Karman line (at 100 kilometres, or 62 miles) is the closest we have to the consensus over what constitutes "space".
We could've drawn it pretty much everywhere because Earth's atmosphere disappears gradually, but these are nice round numbers previously agreed upon.
Therefore, if you're after commercial space flights (like Bezos and Branson are), that's the minimum you need to do to be able to charge millions for a "space flight". There is no incentive to go above that for commercial purposes.
Basically every human has gotten access to all the world's information in the last 10-15 years (unless their government has a firewall).
The fact that 2 people want to actually do something that is extremely inspriring to most non-envious and resentful people is a result of the fact that humanity has massively improved it's state of living recently.
And btw, generally doing inspiring things and failing forwards is much better at improving things. Just have a look at how Tesla has radically changed the car industry and turned it electric. Without Tesla the car industry would be doing fuck all to turn electric.
care to expand on why it is extinct in 15 years?
Did you mean to use some completely different word in place of "poverty" there? Because I'm flabbergasted at this statement.
Literally on the brink of extinction now.
Knowing that even with the wealth to achieve something that once took entire nations to blast off into space for a few minutes, they're still as doomed as the rest of us to perish on this indifferent rock
No man is an island, even with all the wealth in the world. All that wealth is meaningless when everyone else is gone anyhow
Planet will survive, it is incredibly ignorant to think that it even cares about pest that are humans.
No matter how much money any of them have, they can't outrun the planet itself moving on without us
obviously people are not keen on the actions /options that JB has choosen to make. Especially when you hear the stories of his employees and how much tax he pays