Despite Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos’s hope that all polluting industries will someday transition into space, where they’ll be unable to damage Earth’s biosphere, even he acquiesces the process will take many decades, if not centuries to achieve.
“In at least a few hundred years… all of our heavy industry will be moved off-planet,” Bezos has said. “Earth will be zoned residential and light industrial. You shouldn’t be doing any heavy energy on Earth.”
Bezos envisages a future where computer chips are fabricated in colossal orbital factories and solar array farms produce energy 24/7, beaming it down to Earth; where the hugely polluting exploitation of raw materials – including precious minerals and metals of high-value worth – is moved to places where there is no ecosystem to destroy, like the…
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BBC Sky at Night United Kingdom (Digital) - 1 Issue, April 2025