Hold Out Those Great Hopes
Jeff Bezos goes to space, people go berserk
In the year 2000, Jeff Bezos was interviewed by Charlie Rose:
Charlie Rose: If you weren’t CEO of Amazon.com, what would you like to do or be?Jeff Bezos: Well, so, if I could do anything — and it turns out that this is a very hard technical problem, so I don’t actually hold out great hopes — but if I could do anything, I would like to go help explore space.Rose: Tell me more. I mean what would you do? How would you go about it if you weren’t doing this?Bezos: Well, you know, the picture I have is that I would get in a rocket ship, go up into space, and like, you know, go check out a few things. [Laughs] Now this is why I mention at the beginning that this is a very hard technical problem. Rose: It is. [Laughs] But if you put your mind to it, you could probably figure out a way that you could do this.Bezos: Well, it’s very hard. [Laughs]Rose: Your board of directors and your stockholders might not be happy. [Laughs]Bezos: It’s very hard. It’s really — I mean so who knows, what 20 years from now there’s some significant changes in the technology maybe such things will get easier. But we haven’t made significant improvements in space transportation systems really since the Apollo program.
That was 21 years ago.
The people shitting on Jeff Bezos for going into space today are something else. Was it a publicity stunt? Sure, in a way — in so far that more or less anything done in public is a publicity stunt to some degree. Was it vain? I mean obviously on some level, then again much of history is built on vanity. But come on. Some cynicism is always healthy, too much of it is absolutely suffocating.
It’s not just that we want to dice up billionaires and feed them to the masses — billionaires will be fine, they don’t need anyone defending them, they pay people for that — it’s that we seemingly want to kill aspiration. No one would say that, of course. But that’s the end result of all this clutching of pearls.
I mean, a person built a massive business in order to build another business which would take us into space. And this wasn’t one person, there are three people who actually did this simultaneously, in three very different ways. This will be viewed as the Federer/Nadal/Djokovic era of civilian space travel, but to hear it talked about today it’s like we just witness a puppy slaughtering festival.
If you’re not into it, don’t watch it? Don’t cover it? Just keep on living. But also maybe don’t shit on others who derive some level of inspiration and again, aspiration for what they’re doing. They’re fucking going into space on machines they built on Earth! I don’t care who you are, this is cool.
Wait, but we did that 60 years ago. Yes, we did. And then we stopped doing that because of a whole host of reasons, but one of which is that the public lost interest because we became cynical bastards that lost sight of the stars. Like a teenager looking at The Great Pyramid with utter boredom because it’s just a bunch of sand.
Wait, but they didn’t even go into space, technically. Or something. As it turns out, the definition of space is a bit like that of pornography. You know it when you see it: This. Is. Space.
Anyway, let’s just stop bitching for a moment to appreciate that a group of people strapped themselves to a massive rocket and shot themselves into outer-space this morning.¹ And just a week after another group did the same, via an entirely different means. The risk of death was high every step along the way. But it will inspire a new group of young people to push the envelope further and farther. That’s what life is all about. Not one life, the collective life of all of us. My god, get over yourselves, this is fucking amazing:
Published on July 20, 2021 📆Written from San Francisco, CA 🗺Written on a 2021 11-inch M1 iPad Pro ⌨️
¹ Here’s where I’ll admit two things: 1) It did not help that there has never been anything so phallic outside of an actual phallus. 2) Related: this is pretty hilarious.
