Jeff Bezos, World’s Richest Man, Has a Great Day, and Foresees the Future?
Congratulations to Jeff on his successful flight of the Blue Origin Shepard spacecraft.
But more than that, Bezos founded his Courage and Civility Awards of $100 million dollars each, to Van Jones of CNN, and to José Andrés, the Founder of the World Central Kitchen, for giving to humanitarian causes.
I first became aware of Van Jones when he came to UC Irvine and spoke about fighting climate change by giving money to fund insulation for housing of the poor. He was already very popular. He was hired by President Obama as an advisor, but dropped because of his outspoken nature. He is invaluable at CNN.
Before that, Bezos puzzled me by saying that we must go to space to carry out heavy industry there, so that the emissions aren’t left on Earth. What? Bringing heavy materials to space takes enormous emissions, and then bringing products back takes enormous emissions to bring them out of orbit. Later in the day, Bezos said that he would beam them back to Earth. What? Yes, he was a Star Trek fan!
Later, Jeff said that it is cheaper to do things on the Moon because the gravity was only 1/7 that of Earth. Obviously, his thinking is very very far ahead of mine. I must admit that when Amazon was founded as a bookseller, I couldn’t understand why it had a much greater stock evaluation than any bookseller.
Does this mean that there will be an Optimus Prime delivery option of having your purchase immediately beamed from the Moon to wherever in your house that you want to place it? Of course, many of us have our book purchases immediately beamed over WiFi to our iPad’s Kindle app, and it is cheaper than hard bound or paperback.
Maybe MTG was far ahead of her time when she said that Biden ballots were just beamed in by space lasers. Actually she said that the voting machines were hacked. But we are now learning that everything has been hacked.
Oh what a quantum entangled web we weave.
On another personal history note, I was an instructor in Physics at Princeton when Gerard K. O’Neill first proposed his space colony circling the moon, which he did just as an exercise to get the students in the starting Physics class interested. I sat in on the lectures, but never imagined beaming products from the colony to people’s houses.
