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IT was more interesting than another quarterly update of the company. On May 9, Jeff Bezos, the boss of Amazon, staged his farewell party as the space cadet. Mr. Bezos, who is the richest man in the world, has long wanted to use his fortune to advance the cause of spaceflight. His private rocket company, Blue Origin, was founded in 2000. But he was less focused on advertising than Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX and the world's most famous space enthusiast.
Not anymore. In a one-hour presentation, Mr. Bezos presented Blue Origin's lunar lander prototype, a machine that he says could be ready to meet US ambitions to return to the moon by 2024 His plans for a more distant future were more striking. Mr Musk wants humans to colonize Mars as an insurance policy if something were to happen on Earth. Mr. Bezos has no interest in Mars, nor for any other planet in the solar system, which are all (except Earth) rather inhospitable places. Instead, he thinks humans should build their new space homes from scratch.
The idea is not new. Mr. Bezos studied at Princeton and one of his teachers was Gerard O'Neill, a physicist. In 1976, O'Neill published "The High Frontier", a successful book in which he outlined the basic technical principles for determining the functioning of such spatial habitats. It is exactly this type of habitat that Mr. Bezos has advocated as a future way of life for humans.
O'Neill's book offers three forms: a cylinder, a pair of cylinders and a torus. All are hollow, with the living space built inside. All turn, with the centrifugal force felt on the walls taking the place of gravity. Sunlight provides both energy – through solar panels – and lighting, thanks to a system of mirrors and windows. And all are on a heroic scale. The largest are tens of kilometers long and have enough room for millions of people.
For this reason, they should be built by a species that already mastered the space travel, using the resources harvested in the asteroid belt (as Mr. Musk, Mr. Bezos hopes to lower the cost spaceflight at first). These would be strange places to live. The terrain would bend visibly on the sides of the structure. The superstructure of the habitat would be vaulted into the "sky". And since rotation is not a perfect substitute for gravity, moving objects would behave in a strange way, especially if the habitat was small. But, said Mr. Bezos, they also offer several benefits. Climates could be developed ("Maui, its best day, all year round"). The best pieces of the Earth could be reproduced elsewhere (one of his illustrations, illustrated below, represents a space version of Florence).
Their biggest advantage, however, is the amount of living space that they would create. Mr. Bezos' ultimate justification for pursuing such megaprojects is his concern about the mismatch between the exponential process of population growth and the finesse of the Earth's resources. He gave the example of the energy demand, which, according to him, has historically increased by about 3% per year. He argues that if this were to continue, the Earth would, in a few centuries, be fully covered with solar panels. However, with the resources of the solar system under its control and thousands of habitats scattered in space, the human population could easily reach a trillion or more.
Perhaps. It should be noted that Mr. Bezos' justifications date from the same period as his proposed solutions. It is a mathematical truism that exponential growth will eventually overwhelm any fixed and finite amount. These arguments were applied in the most famous way to natural resources in "The Limits to Growth", published by the Club of Rome in 1972. It was not a bold new future, from a past blast.
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