Jeff Bezos joins the ranks of sci-fi enthusiasts convinced that nirvana is to be found off-world
JEFF BEZOS wants humans to live in space. On May 9th the founder and boss of Amazon, who also runs Blue Origin, a private rocketry firm, unveiled plans for a lunar lander. “Blue Moon”, as it is called, is just one phase of a bold plan to establish large off-world settlements. It is a vision ripped directly from 20th-century science fiction.
Space cities might lure settlers by offering to make them rich. But if extraterrestrial settlements remained dependent on imports from Earth, then their cost of living would be astronomical, and the income paid by space work would need to be correspondingly high to provide residents with a generous level of welfare. That, in turn, would require export industries selling things to Earthlings that could not be made on Earth far more cheaply.
Mr Bezos appears to have in mind something other than a trade-based interplanetary economy, however. His plans take for granted speedy technological progress of the sort that would allow for large-scale mining and materials processing by autonomous robots, and construction of vast off-world habitats. The works of science fiction from which his vision borrows often assume the emergence of “fully automated luxury communism”, in which clever machines enable the emergence of a post-scarcity world.
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