Amazon founder Jeff Bezos said in a new interview that he hopes "a trillion" humans will populate the solar system in the distant future, but the only way to achieve that goal is to build a large space station. This is obviously contrary to Musk’s ideal of colonizing Mars. Bezos said that 1 trillion people means there could be "a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins" at any given time. He shared this vision in a 2018 interview.
Bezos said that our solar system has enough resources to support such a large civilization, but humans will not live on other planets.
The only way to realize this vision, he said, is to build a giant space station. "Planet surfaces are too small unless you turn them into giant space stations."
Bezos said humans would harvest resources from planets or the moon to support life on space colonies similar to the cylindrical space stations envisioned by the late physicist Gerard Kitchen O'Neill.
"They have a lot of advantages over planetary surfaces. You can spin them to get normal Earth gravity. You can put them wherever you want," Bezos said of O'Neill-style colonies, adding that most people would want to live near Earth anyway.
Bezos' plan for a space colony is noteworthy because it differs from that of his main rival, SpaceX founder Elon Musk.
Bezos did not explicitly mention Musk in the interview, but the two billionaires have sparred in the past over the future of space colonization.
Musk has repeatedly spoken about his ambition to colonize Mars, claiming he hopes to begin building human settlements as early as 2050.
Bezos, on the other hand, has his sights set on the moon, launching a giant "Blue Moon" lunar lander concept in 2019 that will help humans reach the moon. He also previously talked about O'Neill-style space cylinders that would maintain good climate year-round.
Bezos told Friedman in an interview on Thursday that in the future, humans will be able to choose to travel back and forth between the space station and Earth, and that space colonization is ultimately a means of protecting the earth.
"We've sent robotic probes to all the planets," he said, "and we know it's good."