Building a human colony in outer space or another planet has been the dream of some tech billionaires. Including Jeff Bezos, the former CEO of Amazon who now manages the space company Blue Origin.
While speaking at the 2021 Ignatius Forum, Bezos expressed his vision of life in the future. He predicts humans will live in space colonies and visit Earth only for sightseeing.
The space colony that Bezos is referring to is a floating habitat that has gravity and weather like on Earth. This colony also has rivers and forests and can accommodate one million people.
"Over the centuries, many people will be born in outer space. It will be their first home," Bezos said, as quoted by Business Insider, Saturday (11/13/2021).
"They will be born in this colony, live in this colony. Then, they will visit Earth like when you visit Yellowstone National Park," he continued.
Bezos' idea of building a space colony was actually conveyed when he delivered a graduation speech from high school. According to the 57-year-old man, space colonies are a better option than building life on other planets.
Bezos' concept of life in space is different from the vision of his billionaire colleague and competitor, Elon Musk. The ambition of Musk and his company SpaceX is to build a new human colony on Mars.
The trick is terraforming, or changing the surface of Mars using nuclear weapons to make it safe for humans to inhabit. Bezos later satirized this method.
"Even if you're able to terraform Mars or do really dramatic things like that -- which is very, very challenging by the way -- even if you do that, at best it's just doubling Earth," Bezos said.
Musk also once satirized Bezos' concept of floating colonies. In 2019, he tweeted that such a plan would not work because it would have to remove massive amounts of mass from the planet, moon or asteroid.
"It would be like trying to build the United States in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean," Musk said at the time.
