Just watch Prometheus. This is the same hubris and greed, even if well intentioned.
As the other commentator said, they are too fragile to serve as humanity’s “back-up”. As theme parks or transit vessels, sure. But not as our back-up.
Second, and in my humble opinion more importantly, these will tend to be built and owned by entities and thus everyone in them will be serfs. I honestly can’t say that a similar scenario wouldn’t play out for a planet, claimed as owned by the first flag planted. But, when the structure is wholly built and owned by a profit driven entity such as Amazon... Perhaps they can be owned by consortiums or non for profit entities, there is still issue #1.
Finally. Why build one of these (gravity levels or for transit, I guess being the valid reason I can see, but maybe there is a planet-based solution for the gravity issue, idk) instead of utilizing the planets that are already right there for the using??? And instead of using all the resources to build a habitat, build something else.
Bezos addresses your final question in the presentation. The livable planetary surfaces other than earth (Moon, Mars, maybe Ganymede or something) aren't that big. In total they sum up to somewhere in the realm of Earth's land surface. So inhabiting them is "only" going to enable doubling the human capacity. Whereas space itself will increase human capacity by many orders of magnitude.
These statements are always fantastical. When we talk about humanity exceeding Earth's resource footprint, the issue isn't land in itself. All of our immediate issues come from balancing:
a) How do we harvest energy
b) How much non-human components do we want to leave, and in what configuration, given that significant non-human components are currently required to give us a livable environment
c) How do we distribute resources
Yes ultimately all of those are constrained by land area, but we have so many other things to solve first before land area is THE problem. And hilariously, it's more or less the same problems we need to solve before we need to colonize anything. How do we efficiently (measured in materials, surface area, maintenance, capital, operating cost) collect energy. How do we create and maintain true closed systems that are reasonably conducive to non-shitty human lives. How do we spread the wealth so we don't burn it all down.
Bezos brings land area into it because assuming a 3% growth in energy usage per year, as has been the historical trend, we will need to cover the earth in solar panels in 200 years.
Something he doesn’t touch on is fission/fusion instead of solar, so I am curious about how that changes the calculus.
3% energy growth is unsustainable in the long run; at that rate we are about 1000 years from using more energy per year than the sun emits in totality:
2015 energy usage 110PWh for the entire year[1]
That works out to ~1.8e13 W average power.
Total output for the sun is about 4e26 W[2]
This works out to about 44 doublings, and 3% growth is a doubling every 24 years which means we need to surpass Kardashev II in 1000 years.
I recognized that as well, but then I realized that "covering the earth in solar panels" is pretty much a dumbed-down description of Type I on the Kardashev scale, which we would eventually, inevitably reach regardless of how we generate power.
Why not make the underground habitats on Earth? If you're going to live underground in a fully self-contained ecosystem why bother traveling to a distant planet?
Or on the surface. The oceans are really big and there's a lot of the surface that has basically nothing going on.
Of course this highlights the problem with all of these habitat ideas: They are placed in locations with limited or no easily accessible natural resources, so their options for sustaining themselves are limited. Obviously you need some farmers and janitors and techs to keep everything running, but beyond that what are they going to do? Building stuff is kind of out of the question because you have to ship in all of the raw materials. So your industry needs to be virtual. Coding, finance, etc... But the world only needs so much of that, and if you keep building colonies you're going to saturate the virtual markets while driving insane demand in the physical markets. The economics are hard to reconcile.
I’m willing to wager that by the time we are concerned about finding homes for another full earth load of humans we will be spreading out far beyond just the Moon and Mars. And, as part of an effort to “back-up” humanity that is a good thing. We should be on many, many planets and in many solar systems.
To that point. If one of these habitats is built the first ones should serve as transit vessels to nearby systems, with the final destination of its crew being a planet.
Additionally, let’s take Bezo’s own logic a step further. When gravity levels are less than that of Earth, say, on the Moon, we we’ll be able to build much higher with greater economy. And we will be able to build into the Moon with greater economy as it is 60% the density of Earth. This effectively increases the livable area, if we are to count “engineered surface area”. The same is true of other planetary and Moon surfaces in our solar system.
You once again are left justifying the effort of building the habitat instead of extending the pre existing available planetary foundation
Fair enough. Watch the news. We can’t engineer complex systems without loads of issues. iPhone. The shuttle. Tax code. So, what makes you think we’re gonna nail it when we build one of these???
IMO we do ourselves a disservice by thinking of space colonization as a "back-up". A better way of thinking about it would be that a civilization that can build these habitats, or terraform another planet, also has the technology and resources to fix environmental issues back home. These are of course not short-term goals - I'd consider a 500-year timeline for habitats like the ones pictured above optimistic. But I'd much rather we start now rather than wringing our hands over shorter-term issues like how we think of climate change now.
>they are too fragile to serve as humanity’s “back-up”. As theme parks or transit vessels, sure. But not as our back-up.
I think this is correct. In fact, where we live now, on a (big) planet, should be our "backup" in that you can have subterranean arcologies that protect you while your habitats are blasted by gamma ray bursts, supernovae, or what have you.
(I stress big because I think we need Earth's gravity; I don't think you could lead a healthy life on Mars or much less the Moon.)
But what makes planets terrible for being your "main space" is that the climates and biology are harder to control (climate change, zoonotic pandemics, volcanos, earthquakes, tsunamis, etc.), resources are harder to get (they're buried deep while a wealth of exposed ore exists in the inner Asteroid Belt and a wealth of exposed ice exists in the outer Kuiper Belt), and as someone else here said the space is ironically much smaller than what you could have in a space habitat by surface area or open volume. The gravity's free -- you don't have to spin like you would on a habitat, but you pay for that by the fact that it's very hard to leave. You need to use half your fuel just to reach parking orbit, and it's untenable to build a space elevator. (A space fountain[0] might be doable, but it's still an ordeal.) It only becomes tenable when the gravity's much lower, but then we'll probably run into physiological problems.
As the other commentator said, they are too fragile to serve as humanity’s “back-up”. As theme parks or transit vessels, sure. But not as our back-up.
Second, and in my humble opinion more importantly, these will tend to be built and owned by entities and thus everyone in them will be serfs. I honestly can’t say that a similar scenario wouldn’t play out for a planet, claimed as owned by the first flag planted. But, when the structure is wholly built and owned by a profit driven entity such as Amazon... Perhaps they can be owned by consortiums or non for profit entities, there is still issue #1.
Finally. Why build one of these (gravity levels or for transit, I guess being the valid reason I can see, but maybe there is a planet-based solution for the gravity issue, idk) instead of utilizing the planets that are already right there for the using??? And instead of using all the resources to build a habitat, build something else.
Edit: These are hotels, not homes.