<i>“I wish there were a trillion humans in the solar system. Think how cool that would be. There would be so much dynamism with all of that human intelligence. You’d have a thousand Einsteins at any given moment—and more.</i><p>This one sentence nails everything wrong with the expansionist mindset: we could have a 1000x as many active geniuses as we do now, and all that dynamism and intelligence <i>with our current population</i> if we could just figure out how to better organize the society that we have, stop wasting resources on things that don't matter (like most of the crap Amazon sells), and stop grinding people into dust (the the people toiling in Bezos's warehouses, for example) for the sake of short-term gain, vindictiveness or simple neglect.<p><i>That's</i> where our future lies. Not in throwing in the towel, and simply scaling the current social model out by 1000x.
I think space is cool. Like, really, really, cosmically cool.<p>But before we go ahead with mass colonization, could we maybe prove that we can take care of _this_ planet, reach sustainable living and responsibility stewardship, and stand half a chance of not completely junking up the rest of the planets too?
I would prefer billions. Why do we consider growth a good thing? Why can't we challenge it? Wouldn't it be easier and better to improve the life of a constant number instead of trying to make room for always more and more people and try to make their lives minimally comfortable?
It occurs to me that a lot of the problems about moving the human race into space involve logistics. Which makes me happy we have a guy working on this who is an absolute genius at logistics.
Spot on. The real opportunity in space lies with growth on a scale that Earth simply can't support.<p>I want to hear more about that as an alternative to terrestrial limits to growth based paradigms.
I agree with his assertion that a space-rated nuclear reactor is necessary. I think that in order to be self-sufficient, humans have to be able to make their own little sun wherever they go.