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Dec. 30, 2024 - The David Knight Show

19:48

Billionaires Compete Over Private Space Stations Like "Elysium"

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	Jeff Bezos has been quite upfront about the fact that he wanted to have space stations, like we saw done in Elysium.
	As a matter of fact, I've got a clip of Elysium here to show what he is looking to do, what his aspiration has always been.
	There's a book called High Frontiers by Gerard K. Neal.
	And that really resonated with me as an engineering student.
	And Bezos was an electrical engineer as well in school.
	And he came across it.
	He was a couple years younger than me.
	But he came across it.
	And it was such a captivating idea.
	But he's actually working on it, unlike me.
	I'm one of these low-achieving Americans here.
	But...
	This is something that is, you know, it was there and it came back with Bezos.
	It also came back with Hugo de Garris, who wrote a book on AI. And I interviewed Hugo de Garris.
	I don't share his perspective, his worldview at all.
	Hugo de Garis is an artificial intelligence scientist.
	He has worked for American companies.
	He worked for a while with China until he criticized China, and they kicked him out.
	They canceled him out of there.
	But he is an atheist scientist, and he really believes that you're going to get general artificial intelligence, and it's going to become not only human, but godlike, he says, right?
	And so he would always ask the question of his audiences when he's giving presentations.
	He would always ask them.
	He said, and he was always giving it to groups of scientists.
	And he talked about this in the book.
	He said he'd yet to find any organization of scientists where he would say to them, if you knew that you were going to create artificial intelligence that became, let's say, self-aware like Skynet or something, and it killed everybody, would you still do it?
	And he said it never failed.
	More than half of them would say yes.
	I was not surprised because I saw this in the engineers that worked with the military-industrial complex.
	They had this strange way of not caring how their inventions are going to be used.
	And so for them, it was kind of an intellectual challenge.
	It was a puzzle to be solved.
	And they didn't really care what the consequences are going to be and how this thing is going to be used.
	So, you know, if you want to create some swarm of autonomous killer robots that could be used by some madman in Washington or elsewhere, yeah, I'd solve that problem.
	It was a brilliant solution, right?
	They don't care how it's going to be used.
	And so I wasn't surprised to see that.
	And he was surprised when, and I'd interviewed him several times, and we both spoke at a conference, and it was a lot of Christians that were there in the audience.
	And he said that was the first time that there was an audience that said no.
	They would not create something that could wipe out mankind.
	And he thought that was interesting.
	But that's kind of where he was coming from.
	In his book, the most interesting part of his book, though, instead of arguing about what the essence of intelligence is and talking about the spiritual issues behind it, the thing that I thought was most interesting about his book was what he talked about with the Artilect Wars.
	And he said, eventually what's going to happen is that this is going to accelerate To the extent that the common people see where this is headed.
	And when they see where this is headed, they're going to come after the people like Elon Musk and Sam Altman and the rest of these people who want to enslave us into this technocracy that they want to build.
	And he said, their response is going to be that, because they've got superior technology, he said, I think that they will leave and go stay in these, like, Gerard K. O'Neill high frontier space stations, or what you saw depicted in Elysium.
	And he said, and I think that they'll defend themselves from that with their tech, and I think that they will attack the people who remain back on Earth.
	He called the people on Earth, called them Terrans, he called these people the Cosmos, the Elitists, and he said there'll be a war over artificial intelligence.
	He called it the Artolect War.
	And, you know, I thought that that was a very likely scenario.
	And now, the billionaires and tech barons, there's a whole bunch of companies that are now starting to build private space stations.
	And, of course, Jeff Bezos is one of them.
	And just to remind you of what it looked like with Elysium, Elysium was exactly the type of thing that had been talked about in High Frontiers.
	It looked like this.
	In the 2013 blockbuster movie, Elysium, we are introduced to a fictional space station of immense beauty.
	A luxurious wheel-shaped habitat floating in the heavens.
	Although it may seem out of this world, Elysium's design is backed by science and is actually very realistic.
	A hybrid of the Bishop Ring and Stanford Taurus Elysium is a five-spoke, open-roof torus approximately 60 kilometers in diameter, located 20,000 kilometers above Earth's surface.
	It spins a full rotation every six minutes to produce a force which imitates Earth's gravity, keeping the residents from floating out into space.
	To maintain its atmosphere, Elysium uses a thin layer of controlled plasma, strong enough to prevent air from escaping, but weak enough to allow ships to pass through.
	This technology is mostly fictional, and for a real station, we would build a solid glass roof.
	Anyways, Elysium has a depth of 2 kilometers and 377 square kilometers of habitable surface that can host up to 869,000 people in a suburban and luxurious environment.
	However, if Elysium's surface was an urban environment, it could host up to 10 million people.
	Yeah, each one of these space stations.
	10 million people.
	And that's what he's looking for.
	Now, I don't know that Jeff Bezos wants to live in one of these, but he would like for you to live in one of them.
	And he would like you to work for him in one of them.
	Talk about dropshipping something from Amazon.
	That's basically the way it would operate.
	In the original book, the idea was that they would set these...
	These toroidal, you know, donut-shaped things.
	There's a couple of gravitationally neutral areas.
	Actually, there's five of them, but there's two of them close to the moon.
	And so it's like a kidney-shaped orbit.
	And if you're in that orbit, the gravitational forces cancel out between the moon and Earth.
	And so you just stay there indefinitely.
	And so the idea that Gerard K. O'Neill had was that they would mine stuff on the surface of the moon, and they would sling it up to these space stations where it would just be captured.
	The way they would sling it up would be with maglev things, you know, magnetic levitation, rapidly accelerate the stuff up to escape velocity off the moon, which is less than it is off of the Earth.
	They would capture the stuff there.
	They could do manufacturing there because it's very easy to have cheap, available energy in space.
	If you want something that's super cold, you just paint it white.
	If you want it to be super hot, you paint it black.
	And of course, if you've got a temperature differential, that's what generating power is all about.
	And then after you do your manufacturing up there, and I guess, I don't know, the EPA might not have any...
	Jurisdiction there.
	Who cares about carbon dioxide?
	It'd be really hard.
	And they'll come up with something, right?
	But anyway, you do your manufacturing there.
	You just shove it off and drop it down into the earth.
	Where it comes down.
	So, that was the whole idea.
	And of course, he didn't have it with an open toroid.
	It was enclosed.
	It wasn't this plasma thing.
	I don't think that that would...
	I think that was a fictional thing they did just for the movie to make that operate.
	But anyway, after three decades of circling the Earth...
	In 2031, the International Space Station, ISS, will be handed its last rites.
	And sometime in 2030, astronauts will leave the space station for the final time, assuming that they've got a working spaceship.
	These guys are still stuck there.
	They've just extended it again.
	The people that went up there on that leaky Boeing thing, I was amazed.
	I really...
	I was kind of surprised that they made it there.
	As a matter of fact, I wasn't surprised that they couldn't come back, but fortunately they did make it.
	And so what they'll do is they'll just put it into a lower orbit, let the thing fall down to Earth, break up over the Pacific Ocean.
	If they get all the math correct, let's hope they do.
	Get some Indians to do the math for them, and that's...
	The death of the ISS will mark the close of a major chapter in human space exploration.
	Until now, the space stations have been the preserve of nation states.
	With only the ISS and China's Tiangong in operation, the stations have required billions of dollars of investment and dozens of rocket launches to develop.
	But that could be about to change.
	Just as SpaceX has triggered a flood of funding into private rocket companies, private space stations have been raising billions of dollars in an effort to build future hubs.
	And to put them in orbit.
	And so there's a whole bunch of different companies.
	One of them is Axiom Space.
	They raise more than a half a billion dollars.
	Another company vast is a space business that is backed by crypto billionaire Jeb Jed McCaleb.
	He's the guy behind ripple.
	He's plotting two space stations before the end of the decade.
	Another company called gravetics.
	Meanwhile, has raised tens of millions of dollars for its modular space, real estate.
	NASA itself, along with other space agencies is planning a further station lunar gateway, which will orbit the moon.
	Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin has announced plans to build a space station by 2027 called Orbital Reef.
	He's described it as an orbital mixed-use business park.
	Because, again, he's looking at the high frontier thing.
	He's going to be using it as a business park.
	He's going to be using it for manufacturing.
	I think they want us to live up there.
	They want to stay here.
	This is a big kind of timeshare scam, right?
	They're going to tell you, get your spot up there and you can...
	Do six months up there and they'll pay you some money for that, that type of thing.
	Orbital Reef will be made up of inflatable pods, which can be launched on a regular rocket before being blown up in space.
	These modules could house in-space manufacturing or pharmaceutical technology.
	Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon, believes that before long, millions will live on space stations, he said.
	These are very large structures that are miles on end, and they will hold a million people or more each, he said in 2019. 10 million.
	That's what one of them could hold.
	So, space industry analysts say that this is still far from reality, but they're working on it.
	And again, you know, we'll have to see if they can get to the moon or not.
	That remains to be seen.
	I don't believe they did.
	There's no shortage of startups.
	And...
	Even though the ISS station began in 1998, it took 40 missions flown by both NASA's space shuttle program and the Russian rockets to build the base, and the total cost was estimated to be $150 billion.
	So these different companies that are entering this race, one of them has got a half a billion right now.
	But they don't necessarily need 300 times that much.
	As a matter of fact, one of the things that Musk's SpaceX has been able to do is to lower the cost of a launch for satellites and things like that from $450 million to $67 million.
	In other words, about a seventh of the cost.
	Since 2021, NASA has offered to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to private companies to develop commercial space stations that could be the successors to the ISS. So far, it has handed $400 million to companies including Blue Origin, a Bezos company, Axiom, and to Northrop Grumman.
	The Space Agency's budget suggests spending on this program will rise to $435 million per year by 2027. One startup that has not secured NASA funding is the VastOne, which was, again, the guy that created Ripple, co-founder of Ripple.
	He's a multi-billionaire now, and he's going to invest $1 billion of his money into that.
	He said, we have set out a long-term vision in early 2021. We want to be the company that makes artificial gravity space stations a reality.
	That's what they're talking about.
	That's why they're spinning like that.
	It's been featured in science fiction, but it's pretty simple from a physics point of view.
	Our long-term view is that there will be more people living off Earth Then on Earth.
	That's what I said.
	I think they want to stick us up there so they can, you know, first they get us off the land.
	They take the land.
	We own the land.
	If you want to live somewhere, we can find you a job.
	Maybe if you don't criticize us, we can find you a job in space.
	Vast is the name of the company.
	They hope to launch the first space station, Haven 1, as soon as 2025. Privately run space station will be occupied by crew of four over four two-week expeditions.
	If successful, they're planning to launch a much larger permanent space station, Haven 2, beginning in 2028. So, you know, we'll see what happens and they want to leapfrog that if they can show that Make a case for it and say, look, we've already done this.
	They're hoping they can get some of that federal funding, you know, that is essential for all these guys to get what they want done.
	True government motivation for maintaining human presence in space isn't some desired economic return.
	It is geopolitical in nature.
	It is China.
	That's right.
	All this is, this is not about humanity.
	Reaching for the stars!
	It's not about that at all.
	Elon Musk is a military industrial complex contractor.
	He's a defense contractor.
	I don't like to call a defense contractor.
	They're not about defending us.
	But that's what this is all about.
	As a matter of fact, that was what Trump's big accomplishment, you know, was a space farce.
	My administration is reclaiming America's heritage as the world's greatest spacefaring nation.
	This is really from Spain.
	This is not a farce that somebody else did.
	This was actually produced by Trump's Space Force.
	This is their PR video.
	Boldly reaching into space now.
	And they've got like this Star Trek triangle on the back.
	There's no limit to our sky.
	We're the Space Force Sky.
	I tell you, I feel much better about our conflict.
	Now that is a parody.
	That was the show, Space Force.
	But it is as corny as that, isn't it?
	But if you think that that was funny, this is the real thing.
	All too often, I hear leaders talk about providing everyone with dignity and respect that it's an aspirational goal.
	The Steve Carroll thing.
	That's not good enough.
	Dignity and respect is the bare minimum.
	It's the floor of where we can be.
	This is a guy with his hair pulled back, and he's got earrings, and he's a spokesperson for Space Farce.
	The Corporal Klinger.
	Not a Klingon, but he's a Klinger.
	Like from MASH. Yeah, those are the people that are going to defend.
	It's all about, you know, China.
	As a matter of fact, you know, when I, like I mentioned about Hugo de Garris, I also talked to a guy who is fully on board with all of these organizations that That are neocon, warmonger organizations.
	And Paul Charest, right?
	He wrote the book, The Four Battlegrounds.
	And it was power in the age of AI. Well, what do they mean by that?
	They're not talking about getting all the power plants, giving AI nuclear power plants so that it has all the power and we have nothing.
	No, it was talking about geopolitical power, military power.
	And the whole book was about a war with China that they want to have.
	But I had him on and interviewed him because I wanted him to talk about AI and how it was being incorporated into weapons.
	So when we look at this, I'm going to get back to the elitism here of these people who have...
	Succeeded by getting the American taxpayer to foot the bill for their ventures, their subsidies.
	People like Musk, who has nothing but contempt for us.
	Look, all thieves think they're smarter than their victims, don't they?
	I'm entitled to that, because I outsmarted them.
	Whether you're talking about a white-collar person, or you're talking about some thug that breaks into your home.
	It's the mindset of a thief to think that they are better than the people that they stole stuff from.
	Hello, it's me, Volodymyr Zelensky.
	I'm so tired of wearing these same t-shirts everywhere for years.
	You'd think with all the billions I've skimmed off America, I could dress better.
	And I could, if only David Knight would send me one of his beautiful gray MacGuffin hoodies or a new black t-shirt with the MacGuffin logo in blue.
	But he told me to get lost.
	Maybe one of you American suckers can buy me some at the DavidKnightShow.com.
	And David is giving a 10% discount to listeners from now until 2025.
	At that price, you should be able to buy

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