2045: A Space Fallacy

At Italian Tech Week 2025 in Turin, Bezos said, “In the next couple of decades, I believe there will be millions of people living in space… I don’t see how anybody can be discouraged who is alive right now.”

Of course. Let’s sell people paradise dream-share condos, offer them a glossy brochure for the sky, and while they’re looking up, let the ground burn quietly beneath their feet. This new propaganda reminds me of a bumper sticker I used to see a lot in the early 2000s: Earth First , We’ll Strip Mine the Other Planets Later.

I don’t know what was on Bezos’s mind when he said what he said, but the numbers are staggeringly against him, even for a sci-fi-crazed nut like me. The arithmetic is brutal. A million human bodies weigh about seventy thousand tons. Lifting them into orbit would take thousands of rockets and millions of tons of fuel, about ten days of all the jet fuel the United States burns. And once they’re up there, you’d need millions more tons of food, air, and water every year just to keep them breathing. The physics alone calls the bluff.

But this was never about physics. It’s about subversion, about the story that says we’ll fix it later, somewhere else.

In the meantime, the world is burning, and they keep selling. Scientists from Cornell and the Smithsonian wrote in Science that North America has already lost nearly three billion birds since 1970 — roughly one out of every four, not rare exotics but sparrows and meadowlarks, the sound that used to mean morning. The 2022 State of the Birds report says three-quarters of species they track are declining, even in grasslands we once called safe.

And while that quiet disappearance goes on, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, nineteen million acres of caribou calving ground and polar-bear denning is being opened for oil and gas leasing again. The U.S. is already drowning in oil; even the industry admits it. Drilling there won’t lower prices. It will just slice roads through one of the last places still ruled by animal time.

And the same machine that’s chewing through land is chewing through people. They are slowly eroding workers’ rights. The Elvis Presleys of the corporate world are pushing agendas like:

“Work-life balance is your problem, it’s yours to figure out… I consider it a red flag if you mention work-life balance in the job interview.” – Emma Grede

“If you’re not spending 14+ hours a day working on your dream, you’re ngmi. You can’t build a world-changing product on 9-to-5 energy. 80-hour weeks aren’t extreme. It’s baseline.” – Neha Suresh

“There is no balance… If you want to work 9-to-5, you can have work-life balance. If you want to crush the game - whatever game you’re in, there’s somebody working 24 hours a day to kick your ass.” – Elon Musk

These are the same ones who say work-life balance is for the weak, that exhaustion is a form of devotion, that eighty-hour weeks are how you change the world. We don’t even have room here to talk about how the machine has been dismantling unions and playing nasty games to stop them from forming.

In Japan they’ve given the problem its own word: karoshi, death by overwork. In 2024, the labor ministry logged 1,304 cases, people who either died or collapsed under the strain, seventy-nine of them suicides. A decade ago those numbers lived in rumor; now they sit in government spreadsheets.

India isn’t far behind. Workplace surveys show forty percent of employees reporting burnout, one in five already seeking mental-health help, and about twenty percent planning to quit by forty because the stress has hollowed them out. Women leave sooner, often saying simply, “It’s impossible to balance.”

And in China, the “996” culture, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week, is still worn like patriotism. Suicides among tech workers appear, vanish, reappear. In 2023, at least a dozen cases surfaced online before being scrubbed. A Tsinghua University survey the next year found over forty percent of young professionals calling themselves “chronically unhappy,” and nearly one in ten admitting they’d thought about ending their lives in the past year.

Different languages, same exhaustion. Whether it’s a warehouse outside Delhi, a tower in Tokyo, or a tech park in Shenzhen, the story repeats: the economy demands devotion, and the cost is the body itself.

So it’s a perfect plan. Keep people happy with trinkets, Coneheads-style: “Consume mass quantities.” Make us forget the cost of consumption by telling us this planet is not our last available resource. Stop us from questioning the gradual destruction of the planet. Then wring out the souls of the people who fed these machineries of consumption.

Perfect. Oh, and I almost forgot the icing on the cake, let the government help you do it.
A great trifecta. Or what… maybe a quadfecta. LOL.