The world's richest man wants to build giant orbital cities. Twitter disapproves.
Big Dreams
On Thursday, world's richest man and online bookstore founder Jeff Bezos shared more details about his vision of building gigantic, rotating orbital cities that would allow humans to live in outer space.
Human-induced climate change is ravaging the Earth, so many of the world's most affluent people have suggested starting over in space. Bezos' vision involves multiple space habitats that could serve as cities, parks, or other re-created Earth settings. The idea — which sounds as though it were inspired by a late-night viewing of the 2013 film "Elysium" — immediately got roasted on Twitter.
It’s an extremely rich person idea to think they can simply replace the enormous, rotating habitat called Earth with another one once they’ve fucked up the first planet. https://t.co/aAQmSrkQqC
— Zac Echola (@celiasojourn) May 10, 2019
Reality Check
The idea of migrating to space to live in a billionaire's utopia sounds like it was plucked straight out of science fiction, but many people pointed out that Bezos, if he wanted, could spend much less of his money to fix things here on Earth instead of an aspirational moonshot plan to colonize space.
I love space and think exploration is necessary for practical and aspirational reasons.
But any of the technologies we’d need to make habitats like this in space would be better purposed to like dramatically improving quality of life on Earth https://t.co/1AYhplrAXi
— Dad (@fivefifths) May 9, 2019
almost cartoonish to be living through an ever-worsening climate catastrophe and have billionaires showing off concept art for space habitats
— Kelsey D. Atherton (@AthertonKD) May 9, 2019
Take Two
Others pointed out that Bezos' logic — that space habitats would somehow fare better than the actual planet that we would be escaping — seems questionable.
I wish we had an enormous, rotating habitat with cities and parks right now. God that would be so cool. We would value and protect the shit out of it I bet. https://t.co/9BrgZ1v1Wl
— Chris Scott (@iamchrisscott) May 9, 2019
An enormous rotating habitat in space capable of sustaining life? Wish we had one of those now, I'm sure we'd take good care of it https://t.co/KZXSa3Cogs
— Andrew Lawrence (@ndrew_lawrence) May 9, 2019
Perhaps worst of all, Bezos' extremely-futuristic space stations might not even be all that advanced — according to artistic renderings, the sci-fi orbital habitats will have us using the farming technology of yesteryear.
Bezos’s space dream doesn’t even have the latest tractor technology smh pic.twitter.com/dwUPzXuZw2
— conrad🌱 (@vendaval) May 10, 2019
More on space cities: Jeff Bezos: In the Future, We'll Live in "Giant Space Colonies"
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