2005 BRAVE NEW WORLD
STORAGE IS A PROBLEM for most city dwellers and, despite our ascent into high-rise spaces due to overcrowding on the ground, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, arguably the world’s greatest entrepreneur, wants to send space-hogging stuff to, well, space. So is this a matter of us shifting our junk to another planet and carrying on with our unbridled consumption? Soberingly, no. It is rooted in a dire environmental crisis on Earth that needs urgent solutions.
Though this may conjure up images of film director Luc Besson-esque scenes, it is the elements of travel and storage, rather than a sci-fi “fifth element”, that Bezos is cultivating. His comments at the International Space Development conference last year, backed by his pledged annual investment of approximately $1.4 billion of Amazon stock into his space-exploration business, Blue Origin, demonstrate that inhabiting another planet is firmly in his sights. Other pioneers in this field are Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Richard Branson’s Galactic, which both have intergalactic rockets in development for space tourism. Given that Musk claims his rockets will be
