- Come to share with us briefly the vision of Blue Origin,
and the idea of kind of a space tourism
with renewable rockets.
- This is super important to me,
and I believe on the longest time frame, and really, here,
I'm thinking of a time frame of a couple hundred years.
So, over many decades, I believe,
and I get increasing conviction with this
with every passing year,
that Blue Origin, the space company,
is the most important work I'm doing.
And so, there's a whole plan for Blue Origin.
- Wait, so you say retail, online,
e-commerce, publishing,
- Yes.
- That's all less relevant than the space program.
- Yes, yes, and I'll tell you why.
First of all, of course, I'm interested in space,
because I'm passionate about it,
and I've been studying it and thinking about it
since I'm a five-year-old boy.
But, that is not why I'm pursuing this work.
I'm pursuing this work because I believe, if we don't,
we will eventually end up with a civilization of stasis.
Which, I find very demoralizing.
I don't want my great-grandchildren's great-grandchildren
to live in a civilization of stasis.
We all enjoy a dynamic civilization of growth and change,
and let's think about what powers that.
We are not really energy-constrained,
and so, let me give you just a couple of numbers.
If you take your body,
your metabolic rate as a human, as just an animal,
you eat food, that's your metabolism.
You burn about 100 watts, your power.
Your body is about 100.
It's the same as a 100 watt light bulb.
We're incredibly efficient.
Your brain is about 60 watts of that.
Amazing.
If you extrapolate in developed countries,
where we use a lot of energy,
on average, in developed countries,
our civilizational metabolic rate is 11000 watts.
So, in a natural state, you know, where we're animals,
we're only using 100 watts.
In our actual, developed world state,
we're using 11000 watts, and it's growing.
For a century or more,
it's been compounding at a few percent a year;
our energy use as a civilization.
Now, if you take baseline energy usage, globally,
across the whole world,
and compound it at just a few percent a year,
for just a few hundred years,
you have to cover the entire surface
of the earth in solar cells.
So, that's the real energy crisis,
and it's happening soon.
And by soon, I mean within just a few hundred years.
And so, we don't actually have that much time.
So, what can you do?
Well, you can have a life of stasis,
where you cap how much energy we get to use.
We have to work only on efficiency.
By the way, we've always been working on energy efficiency,
and still we grow our energy usage.
It's not like we have been squandering energy.
We have been getting better at using it
with every passing decade, and still, we grow.
So, stasis would be very bad, I think.
Now, take the alternative scenario,
where you move out into the solar system.
The solar system can easily support a trillion humans,
and if we had a trillion humans,
we would have a thousand Einsteins, and a thousand Mozarts,
and unlimited, for all practical purposes,
resources from solar power, and so on.
Why not?
That's the world I want my great-grandchildren's
great-grandchildren to live in.
And, by the way, I believe that we'll move all heavy,
in that time frame, we will move all heavy industry
off of Earth, and Earth will be zoned
residential and light industry.
It'll basically be a very beautiful planet.
We have sent robotic probes to every planet
in the solar system now.
And believe me, this is the best one.
- But, when can...
- It is not even close.
- But, when can I buy the first ticket
to do a little space tour?
- The first tourism vehicle will,
we won't be selling tickets yet,
but we may put humans in it at the end of this year,
or at the beginning of next year.
- So, it's very complete.
- And we're getting very close.
We've been working on it for more than two years,
and we're building a very large orbital vehicle.
We've been working on that for more than five years.
It'll fly for the first time in 2020,
and the key is re-usability.
So, you mentioned it:
We cannot, the civilization I'm talking about,
you know, getting comfortable, living and working in space,
having millions of people, and then billions of people,
and then, finally, a trillion people in space.
You can't do that with space vehicles
that you'd use once and then throw away.
It's a ridiculous, costly way to get into space.