Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, and Jeff Bezos, owner of Blue Origin. BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI, ALMOND NGAN/AFP via Getty Images
We need more people. That's the message from two of the world's richest billionaires, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Tesla boss Elon Musk.
While the two compete in the space business – Bezos owns Blue Origin while Musk owns SpaceX – they agree on certain aspects of humanity's future.
“I think we're very like-minded on a lot of these ventures,” Bezos said in an episode of the Lex Fridman Podcast released this week. He added, “I don't know Elon really well,” but said he liked the idea of developing a friendship with him.
When asked what he hoped for humanity's future in space hundreds or thousands of years from now, he replied:
“I would like to see a trillion people living in the solar system. If we had a trillion people, we would have a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins at any given time… Our solar system would be full of life, intelligence and energy.”
What companies like Blue Origin and SpaceX are doing, he said, is creating the space infrastructure upon which future generations can build greater things.
“When I founded Amazon, I didn't have to develop a payment system. It already existed. It was called a credit card,” he said. “I didn't have to develop a transport system to deliver the packages. It already existed. It was called the Postal Service and Royal Mail and Deutsche Post. And so the entire heavy-duty infrastructure was already in place. And I could stand on his shoulders.”
He said he wants to use his “Amazon profits” to build extensive infrastructure to be used by the space entrepreneurs of future generations.
“If you can start a really valuable space company in a dorm room, then we know we've built enough infrastructure for ingenuity and imagination to really be unleashed,” he said. “I find that very exciting.”
He imagines people living in giant space stations that have “many advantages over planetary surfaces,” including the ability to rotate them to create normal gravity. He said most people want to live close to Earth and vacation there, “like you might go to Yellowstone National Park.”
He assumes that Earth's environment will be protected by moving heavy industry into space, using resources on the moon and in the asteroid belt.
As for Musk, he has long stressed the need for humanity to become a multiplanetary species, and he envisions SpaceX's Starship rockets transporting people between Earth and Mars, where a permanent human presence would be established.
“We don’t want to be one of these single-planet species, we want to be a multi-planet species,” he said in 2021 after SpaceX sent astronauts into orbit on a reused rocket.
He also warned of an “underpopulation crisis” here on Earth. In the summer of 2022, he said that falling birth rates in many countries represented “by far the greatest threat to civilization.”
A few years earlier he had warned“The biggest problem the world will face in 20 years is population collapse.”
This weekend he sounded similar warnings while attending a political festival in Italy hosted by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.
“It’s important to have children and create a new generation,” he told attendees. “As simple as it sounds, if people don’t have children, there is no new generation.”
Earlier this year, after China released figures showing a declining birth rate, Musk said tweeted: “Population collapse due to low birth rates poses a much greater risk to civilization than global warming… remember these words.”