Earth might one day become a vacation destination just like our national parks, according to Jeff Bezos.
The Blue Origin founder said in a new interview that he predicts people who are born in space will one day take vacations to Earth “the way you visit Yellowstone National Park.”
He also spoke of floating space cities that can hold a million people, in a habitat replete with “rivers and forests and wildlife,” during a panel discussion at the Ignatius Forum in Washington, DC, this week, the Independent reported.
“Over centuries, many people will be born in space, it will be their first home,” said 57-year-old Amazon entrepreneur, who recently pledged to donate $2 billion toward wildlife conservation and developing sustainable food systems. “They will be born on these colonies, live on these colonies, then they’ll visit Earth the way you would visit, you know, Yellowstone National Park.”
Bezos also said that he believes that high-tech colonies in space are more viable than any attempt to start new life on another planet, namely Mars, in reference to Elon Musk’s plan, whose commercial space venture SpaceX rivals Blue Origin.
Musk has said that he wants to see a million humans colonizing Mars by 2050.
“Even if you were to terreform Mars or do something very dramatic like that — which could be very, very challenging, by the way — even if you were to do that, that is, at most, a doubling of Earth,” said Bezos.
“Then you’re going from 10 billion people to 20 billion people,” he added.
Bezos also nudged the idea of intelligent life-forms on other planets.
“How could there not be. There are so many stars, just in this galaxy. And then so many galaxies,” he said. “The odds that we are the only intelligent life in the universe seem vanishingly small to me.”
Nevertheless, the billionaire is dubious that extraterrestrials have visited our planet: “I very much doubt that. I think we would know if we had been. But are they out there? Probably.”