Let’s know who Jeff Bezos is?
Jeff Bezos founded the aerospace manufacturer and sub-orbital spaceflight services company Blue Origin in 2000. Blue Origin’s New Shepard vehicle reached space in 2015, and afterwards successfully landed back on Earth. The company began commercial suborbital human spaceflight. And did two successful human spaceflights in 2021.
He also purchased the major American newspaper The Washington Post in 2013 for $250 million and manages many other investments through his venture capital firm, Bezos Expeditions. In September 2021, Bezos co-founded biotechnology company Altos Labs with Mail.ru founder Yuri Milner.
The first centibillionaire on the Forbes wealth index. Bezos was named the “richest man in modern history” after his net worth increased to $150 billion in July 2018. In August 2020, according to Forbes, he had a net worth exceeding $200 billion. In 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, Bezos’s wealth grew by approximately $24 billion, on July 5, 2021.
Bezos stepped down as the CEO of Amazon and transitioned into the role of executive chairman. Andy Jassy, the chief of Amazon’s cloud computing division, replaced Bezos as the CEO of Amazon. On July 20, 2021, Jeff Bezos flew to space alongside his brother Mark. The suborbital flight lasted over 10 minutes, reaching a peak altitude of 66.5 miles (107.0 km).
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Jeff Bezos’s prediction
Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and the self-funded space explorer, has predicted that Earth will soon be turned into a natural resort as only a few people will be allowed to stay here in the future.
“This place is special, we can’t ruin it,” the billionaire said at the annual Ignatius Forum in Washington, DC. Talking about his own company, Blue Origin, he said the experts aim to make sure that millions of humans get to not just work in space but also be born and call space their first home.
“Millions of people will move from Earth to space over time. And that’s the vision of Blue Origin – millions of people working in space,” Bezos said.
“Over centuries, most or many of the people will be born in space. It will be their first home. They will be born in these colonies, they will live in these colonies. They may visit Earth the way you would visit Yellowstone National Park,” he predicted.
Bezos believes that the space colonies in future will have ‘rivers and forests and wildlife of their own. He also claimed that it is inevitable to expand the living zones for humans if the race continues growing at the same rate. “This Earth can support, let’s say, 10 billion people to a certain degree. We’d have to work really hard to figure out how to do that without degrading the planet… The solar system can support a trillion people,” he said.
Even though the billionaire is quite positive about shifting humanity to space and keeping the Earth for a selected few, he was hesitant about claiming who will get to decide who stays on Earth. He also said his company can be label as ‘Earth ambassadors’ in future.
“The hard part is not space travel – that part was solved in the 1960s. Not reusability – the space shuttle sort of did that. The hard part is operational reusability,” he said. “It requires practice to get it right.”
