Does Jeff Bezos even watch ‘The Expanse’? Science Fiction has harsh lessons for Blue Origin’s utopian vision

In a Thursday presentation, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos unveiled a lunar lander and announced plans, not just for a return to the moon by 2024—“this time to stay,” Bezos said—but also a utopian vision for the human colonization of space, retasked from the 1970s work of physicist Gerard K. O’Neill.

Bezos deliberately elided the many steps between today and O’Neill colonies to narrow Blue Origin’s mission to engineering obstacles, specifically the “two gates” standing between us and a spacebound future. Bezos has long described himself as a science fiction fan, particularly of Star Trek. He reads Alastair Reynolds , Ernest Cline and Andy Weir . There’s no mistaking the overwhelming science-fictional ambition O’Neill cylinders represent, with Bezos depicting a future in the same spirit as NASA’s own 1970s efforts at farsight, remembered most in images of space colonies by NASA illustrators like Rick Guidice and Don Davis—both obvious influences on Bezos’ concept art.

Technology in The Expanse isn’t presumptively beneficial to all, but a volatile force that reshapes the terms of conflict between human institutions fighting for their material interests. Heinous violations of autonomy and dignity become possible when there is no planetary commons, leading to uniquely spaceborne forms of exploitation. It’s hard to win a labor strike when your employers control the very air.

“We have to realize that there are immediate problems, things that we have to work on. And we are working on those things,” Bezos said, in his one concession to the immediate material concerns often weighed against the costs of space programs. “I’m talking about poverty, hunger, homelessness, pollution, overfishing in the oceans, this is a very long list of urgent, immediate problems. And we need to work on those things, urgently, in the here and now. But, there are also long-range problems.

His words also evoke an essay by evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, which laments a loss of potential Einsteins to the “near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.

It’s not such an easy choice in The Dispossessed, which refuses both consumer demand as a universal constant and the conflation of endless economic growth with human dynamism. Where Bezos assumes a future shaped by the same market forces that built Amazon, Anarreans practice horizontal decision making, shared between syndicates and other community-organized economic participants.

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