Theme Park Earth 🌍

Earth as home, resource, and tourist attraction.

Illustration by Nikki Ritmeijer

This week two related, and telling, stories caught my eye. Take them as two signs of the times.

A few days ago Jeff Bezos spoke at an event called Our Future in Space. In conversation with the Washington Post journalist David Ignatius, Bezos said that in centuries to come millions of humans will live in vast, floating cities among the stars.

People will be born in space, said Bezos, and know it as their first home. They’ll visit Earth, ‘the way you would visit Yellowstone National Park’. You can see the whole conversation here.

Meanwhile, the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow ended yesterday.

Working late into Saturday night, delegates managed to agree a final text. But the emissions pledges made in that text won’t limit warming to 1.5C; the agreement states only that nations will gather in Egypt next year to look again at emissions. And a promise to ‘phase out’ coal was diluted at the last minute, so that it’s now a promise to ‘phase down’ coal. Just as it sounds, the language phase down was chosen because no one really knows what it means.

One week; two stories. Taken together they would be funny, if the situation we find ourselves in wasn’t so serious.