"You guys paid for all this"

Jeff Bezos holds Amelia Earhart's aviation glasses, July 20, Van Horn, Texas – photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images

We live on this beautiful planet. We saw this – you can’t imagine how thin the atmosphere is when you see it from space. We live in it and it looks so big. It feels like this atmosphere is huge and we can use it and disregard it and treat it poorly. When you get up there and you see it, you see how tiny it is and how fragile it is.

We need to take all heavy industry, all polluting industry, and move it into space, and keep Earth as this beautiful gem of a planet that it is.

Jeff Bezos wants us all to know that by flying into 'space', he is now enlightened.

I wonder if Bezos recognizes all these are connected: capitalism, droughts, industrial pollution, insurrections, tax rates, pandemics, wildfires and floods, inequality, callousness. We now know it doesn't take brains to win a presidential election, and it doesn't take vision to fly into space. In America, all it takes is money and ego.

Bezos should ask himself: how do we move all heavy industry into space without polluting? even if we got those industries into space, how do we supply them with parts and resources, or return their products to 'this beautiful gem' without polluting?

Bezos is not thinking straight. That, or he's thinking of all the money to be made shuttling people and materials up and down.

Bezos is proposing we treat our celestial shores the way we treated the waterways and oceans during the industrial revolution. History tells us there were some seriously bad consequences. Some of these are 'stabilized' now – to a point – but only after the world suffered, and continues to suffer from: diseases, human subjugation, chemical contamination, inequitable wealth distribution, environmental destruction.

Instead of prioritizing a sustainable power grid, or emissions-free transportation systems, or fair-minded global banking, or low-carbon construction and manufacturing methods – or generally reducing the amount of crap we buy on Amazon – we should just shoot all the polluted stuff into the sky. And we should listen to Bezos cause he's been there.

It's a matter of understanding all the parts before we see the whole, or consider solutions - big picture stuff. Take the recent example of Miami: the inhabitants of Miami experience increased 'sunny-day flooding', so they install pumps. The flood waters rise and the drainage system becomes a flooding system, so they add back-flow valves and treatment plants. They extend the seawall. They elevate the streets. And on it goes. Yet, the water continues to rise.

Thus, a common through-line for these species-level challenges is our inability to perceive them at scale. In terms of climate change, NY Times columnist Charlie Warzel describes our view this way:

[O]ur 21st century existence is characterized by the repeated confrontation with sprawling, complex, even existential problems without straightforward or easily achievable solutions. Theorist Timothy Morton calls the larger issues undergirding these problems “hyperobjects,” a concept so all-encompassing that it resists specific description. … We understand the contours of the problem, can even articulate and tweet frantically about them, yet we constantly underestimate the likelihood of their consequences. It feels unthinkable that, say, the American political system as we’ve known it will actually crumble.

Climate change is a perfect example of a hyperobject. The change in degrees of warming feels so small and yet the scale of the destruction is so massive that it’s difficult to comprehend in full.

One attempt to provide a high-level, long-term view is this eye-opening study: "Update to Limits to Growth", by Harvard researcher and KPMG analyst Gaya Herrington. It reexamines and appears to confirm the projections of a fifty-year-old model developed at MIT ("Limits to Growth"). The model plots several broad variables (population, food production, industrial output, resources) out forty years, and expresses the risk of a global collapse during the 21st century. The study refreshes those metrics, comparing current empirical data to the original model's 'scenarios':

BAU2 (business as usual) and CT (comprehensive technology) scenarios show a halt in growth within a decade or so from now. Both scenarios thus indicate that continuing business as usual, that is, pursuing continuous growth, is not possible. Even when paired with unprecedented technological development and adoption, business as usual as modeled by 'Limits to Growth' would inevitably lead to declines in industrial capital, agricultural output, and welfare levels within this century. 

I suspect both the model and the study are intended more as a warning light than a predictive tool. Herrington comments that 'collapse' …

… does not mean that humanity will cease to exist, … economic and industrial growth will stop, and then decline, which will hurt food production and standards of living, … the BAU2 scenario shows a steep decline to set in around 2040.

However, there are other scenarios, such as "SW (stabilized world)", in which growth does not hit the same peak industrial output, but plateaus at a lower level and does not 'collapse'. Unfortunately, the scenarios that avoid collapse do not align as well with the current data. 

The study does not preclude the BAU2 scenario from generating some amazing technologies or accomplishments, like an Alexa factory in space. It simply shows that less-managed growth will likely result in a more-damaged planet, accompanied by increased inequality and human suffering. If we build cheaper, cleaner launch vehicles to orbit communications and weather satellites, or platforms for basic science (so we can invent, say, the next transistor), or find any other useful purpose for the journey – that could be a net-gain. Why don't we just try to do that? what is the point of traveling up and down just for the hell of it?

Less growth is fine. Less money is fine. We should consider quantities that are sustainable and equitable. What more does Bezos need to fulfill his bald, evil, supervillain fantasies? isn't Amazon already printing enough money? isn't he already the richest man in the world?

Upon landing, Bezos posts a tweet that reads:

I want to thank every Amazon employee, and every Amazon customer, because you guys paid for all this.

I'm an uneasy Amazon customer of twenty-five years. As a benefactor, let me say – Jeff, you know where you can go.

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One of the saddest stories yet of this pandemic (there have been so many) is given by Dr Brytney Cobia, of a young patient, about to intubated, begging for a vaccine. As the world approaches two hundred million total cases, it's hard to know if anyone is counting them correctly any more.

For example, recently while Georgia's published case counts are less than half the counts in Portugal, the death counts, just today, fall lower than Portugal's (a lag of about two months). How can the case counts be so much lower? is it the vaccination rates (GA: 45%, PT: 64% with at least one dose)? Recall that back at the beginning of June, Georgia was just ahead of Portugal (GA: 40%, PT: 38%). Looking at the graphs of cases and deaths, the correlation in Georgia, especially during this calendar year. is much less clear than in Portugal.

 cases: 193,375,410 global • 35,213,594 USA • 943,244 Portugal

deaths: 4,150,990 global • 626,172 USA • 17,248 Portugal