How Rich Is Too Rich?

Well, if I were to hazard a guess, I would say that if you are so rich that you are surrounded by toadies who tell you that your idea to pollute space as a way to reduce pollution on earth, you are too rich.

I am referring, of course to one Jeffrey Preston Bezos, who just made that suggestion:

Seriously, this guy is making the Trump kids look like geniuses:

Noted cowboy cosplay enthusiast Jeff Bezos visited the edge of space on Tuesday.

I just wanted to note here, "Noted cowboy cosplay enthusiast," is a remarkably deft slam.

I wish that I could come up with stuff like that.

The only hope of saving Earth from Amazon’s creeping influence was that Bezos would experience what’s referred to as the “overview effect,” a feeling astronauts have reported. It results in a realization that we need to protect the planet at all cost, and it happens when space visitors have seen the world without borders and the fleeting atmosphere that encases Earth.

It appears Bezos felt that.

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Powerful stuff from the world’s richest man. It’s a change from the cutthroat business mindset. Could this signal a shift? Perhaps Bezos would want to back more stringent taxes on the ultra-wealthy so that billionaires don’t warp our discourse? Or maybe he had an epiphany that he should offer better conditions for Amazon warehouse workers forced to suffer through heat and so-called “power hours” while racing to fulfill orders? Perhaps coming back to Earth a changed man would convince him to end one-day shipping and its toll on the environment and people?

If you answered, "No," you are correct.

“When you get up there, and you see it, you see how tiny it is and how fragile it is,” Bezos continued. “We need to take all heavy industry, all polluting industry and move it into space.”

Yes, that’s right. Jeff Bezos would like to move all polluting industry into space. The world’s richest man acknowledged this would take “decades and decades to achieve.” But one absolutely worth it for his bottom li... errr, the safety of the biosphere.

I know what my first thought was when I heard this:

I rather imagine that a lot of you felt the same way.

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Moving entire industries into space is just unfathomable. Producing, say, an electric Ford Bronco or even an Amazon Echo in space is quite possibly the dumbest idea I have ever heard. It already requires skilled workers and robots right here on Earth. What Bezos is proposing would require ensuring technologies work in zero gravity (or that we perfect emulating gravity in space), getting raw materials up to your Ford Bronco space station, then transporting said Bronco back to Earth.

There are, of course, a number of other hard-to-decarbonize industries out there such as cement and steel. But the cost for a payload of cement to be shipped back to Earth is comically high. Like Scrooge-McDuck-money-vault levels of high. There are also technologies being developed right here on Earth that could decarbonize them at or sooner than the “decades and decades” timeframe Bezos is advocating for. And they have a jumpstart on Bezos’ nonexistent space cement factories. (Though some space startups are at least pitching commercial outposts.)

My solution is for Amazon to use trained octopi in their fulfillment centers, with voracious moray eels acting as foremen and EATING any unfortunate Cephalopod who is taking too long to complete a task.

Of course, that will never happen, because Jeff Bezos has no tolerance for such gentle management of his employees.