Jeff Bezos's Wild Dream of a Trillion People Living Throughout the Solar System on Gigantic Space Stations

Billionaire Jeff Bezos has long spoken about his fantasy of colonizing space, which would have one trillion humans living across the solar system.

Knewz.com has learned that experts have recently weighed in on the feasibility of the Amazon founder's sci-fi dream.

Jeff Bezos discussed his vision of colonizing space in an interview with Lex Fridman in 2023. By: X/Lex Fridman

Bezos spoke of his fantastic vision on the Lex Fridman podcast in December 2023, saying that humans would be spread across space, living in massive space stations.

During his interview with Fridman, Bezos discussed space exploration and rocket engineering and elaborated on his idea of colonizing space.

"I would love to see a trillion humans living in the solar system. If we had a trillion humans, we would have, at any given time, 1,000 Mozarts and 1,000 Einsteins," Bezos said during the podcast.

"Our solar system would be full of life, and intelligence, and energy, and we could easily support a civilization that large with all of the resources in the solar system."

Artist's depiction of the O'Neill cylinder. By: NASA Ames Research Center

"The only way to get to that vision is with giant space stations, the planetary surfaces are just way too small unless you turn them into giant space stations," Bezos explained, adding that humankind could take resources from the moon, or near-Earth objects, or the asteroid belt, and so on.

"And we'll build giant O'Neill-style colonies and people would live in those."

By "O'Neill-style colonies," Bezos is referring to a concept called "O'Neill cylinders," a space settlement concept proposed by American physicist Gerard K. O'Neill in his 1976 book. Notably, the cylindrical space station shown in the Christopher Nolan film Interstellar closely resembled an O'Neill cylinder.

"[Humans] will be able to use much more energy and much more material resources in space than they would be able to use on Earth," Bezos theorized.

"I won't live long enough to see the fruits of this, but the fruits of this come from building a road to space, getting the infrastructure."

However, the theory begs the question of how feasible his vision could be in real life, a question that Business Insider posed to experts.

"The vision of Gerard K. O'Neill is inspiring, but it's absolutely humongous," Anthony Longman, an independent architect who designed a space habitat concept that can house roughly 8,000 people, told the outlet.

"I'm not saying they won't be built, but I think it will probably be some hundreds of years before we're able to build anything at that scale."

Business Insider pointed out that the envisioned design of O'Neill colonies could house several million people and would be around 500 square miles inside. The cylinder would rotate to generate artificial gravity.

Researchers have already been successful in growing a few crops on the international space station. By: MEGA

"O'Neill thought that we could establish natural ecosystems, bodies of water, and even weather systems inside. From there, we could build farms, transit systems, and bustling cities," the outlet explained.

As of now, researchers have already been successful in growing a few crops on the international space station, like tomatoes and lettuce. According to the "Microbiological and Nutritional Analysis" of the crops published in the journal Frontiers, they turned out as nutritious as the ones grown on Earth.

However, Rebeca Gonçalves, an astrobiologist formerly at the European Space Agency whose research focuses on how we might grow crops off-world, like on Mars, pointed out that to ensure the scale of agricultural production required to sustain a human colony, "We need to develop these very safe, closed-loop, self-sustainable agricultural systems."