Now, in 2019, Jeff Bezos wants his private space company to take over the public imagination about life in space. Bezos is the head of a retail empire, and he knows how to sell an image, but what he’s offering today is a watered-down version of nostalgia for yesterday’s future. Bezos’s proposal is a version of O’Neill’s project that somehow manages to look and feel less futuristic than its predecessor. — CityLab
The possibility of humans living in space is nothing new. Authors, scientists, and designers have all dreamed and formulated how this could be possible. Amazon founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos, recently pitched his idea for space habitation and how his private space company Blue Origin would make this possible. After looking at rendered images of Bezos' idea some have noticed the stark similarities between them and former Princeton physicist Gerard O'Neill's work presented in 1975. These similarities are intentional due to Bezos being a former student of O'Neill's. Architectural academic, designer and researcher Fred Scharmen shared with CityLab his thoughts on the new project and its relation to O'Neill's idea.
"With so many similarities evident between these two visions, it’s worth asking: Have we really learned anything in the past 50 years about how to plan for a better human future?" Scharmen cleverly assess Bezos' intention and provides an astute response to the Amazon founder and his "out of this world dream."
"The renderings produced for O’Neill’s 1970s project were painted by Rick Guidice, who trained as an architect and graphic artist, and Don Davis, who had a background illustrating planetary science. Both men had roots in the counterculture, and they filled their space-habitat interiors with Buckminster Fuller’s domes and Reyner Banham’s architectural megastructures. [...] But Bezos’ renderings, like his bigger ideas, don’t contain anything new."
As enthusiastic as he may be, Bezos paints a picture of a "possible future" than many are confused by. Thanks to a series of renderings the public have noticed visual details that are anything but unnoticeable and questionable. Scharmen states, "In Bezos's imagination, older, more future-forward buildings become parodied, privatized, and zombified. The spaces are drenched in thick rays of light, as if to preserve all of this architecture in a giant jar of treacly honey. It's not just the imagery that's stale. The framing and assumptions behind the whole enterprise are outdated, too. From the viewpoint of 2019, the simple optimism of 1975 seems quaint."
10 Comments
Bezos is vying for military space contracts. He's funded by the CIA (and most likely the NSA and NRO) and has a seat at the Pentagon on an advisory board. Owning mass media gives him a platform to advance these agendas with propaganda.
"He's funded by the CIA" <-- citation needed
Okay, it's because they have contract with AWS. It's cloud computing, everybody needs it. When you put it that way, you make it sound like he's a sleeper agent or something.
Hardly a sleeper. Intel agencies, the Pentagon, mass media. But it's OK, it's just cloud computing. Duh.
Trump will award him the contract to build a deathstar
Bezos will hire Trump away from Putin when he needs a side show barker.
novel idea....solve 21st century problems first, then think about 23rd century problems
Looks like having people living in the Truman Show is Bezos dream..
Imagine how many living wages he could pay with the cost of just one space village.
Bezos could fund the HollywoodLighthouse and save the planet, but he still couldn't slap his name on it.
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