Jeff Bezos says humans likely to live in space stations before inhabiting planets

Jeff Bezos expressed his vision for a far-off future during a recent interview in which "a trillion" people live in the solar system, but the only practical means of transportation will be enormous space stations.

A trillion people would mean that there could be a "thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins" at any given time, according to the founder of Amazon and Blue Origin, who made this claim on the Lex Fridman podcast on Thursday. He first discussed this idea in an interview from 2018 with Mathias Döpfner, CEO of Axel Springer, the parent company of Business Insider.

According to Bezos, there are enough resources in our solar system to sustain a civilization that size, but humans won't be visiting other worlds.

"The only way to get to that vision is with giant space stations, he said. "The planetary surfaces are just way too small unless you turn them into giant space stations."

According to Bezos, in order to sustain life on space colonies that resemble the cylindrical space stations that the late physicist Gerard Kitchen O'Neill envisioned, mankind will draw resources from planets or the moon.