Jeff Bezos: Future Humans 'Will Visit the Earth the Way You Visit Yellowstone'

According to Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos, future generations "will visit Earth the way you visit Yellowstone National Park." Gizmodo reports: The remarks came last week at an event held at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC, with NASA Administrator Bill Nelson and others talking about space policy. Bezos sat down for a one-on-one chat with Adi Ignatius, the editor-in-chief of the Harvard Business Review. He brought up themes we've heard before, including his vision that all polluting industries will exist in space one day and that we'll all live on space colonies that could, in his estimation, support 1 trillion people. But he expanded on his vision in greater detail about what, exactly, will happen to the planet we'll all leave behind for Blue Origin-branded space colonies. "This is the most precious planet in the world and we have to preserve it and conserve it and make sure that our children and their children and so on have this beauty in their lives," Bezos said. "We need to conserve what we have, restore what we've lost," he said. "This planet is so small, if we want to keep growing as a civilization, using energy as a civilization, most of that needs to be done off-planet. ... This place is special. You can't ruin it." To do that will require us all to live in space colonies. That would leave Earth to eventually be, in Bezos' vision, a place for future folks to visit but not live. "They may visit Earth the way you visit Yellowstone National Park," Bezos said. Ignatius asked a follow-up about who gets to live on Earth in this vision, which Bezos did not answer. "It's extremely telling that Bezos' vision for the future of Earth is Yellowstone National Park," comments Gizmodo's Brian Kahn, a former park ranger. "Bezos' big idea of turning Earth into Yellowstone elides the fact that humans are as much a part of this planet as they were part of Yellowstone before Americans showed up. He's pitching a very Western solution to the very Western problem of climate change and environmental degradation, problems that Bezos' very own businesses have played a major role in while enriching him to the point where he now has a huge sway on humanity's next step."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.