Jeff Bezos and his fiancé, Lauren Sanchez, recently announced that they will be giving away the bulk of his fortune, more than $124 billion. "The hard part is figuring out how to do it in a levered way,” said Bezos. Jeff has already committed to giving roughly 8% of his current net worth, around $10 billion, over 10 years, to the Bezos Earth Fund, which Lauren co-chairs.
Most of Bezos’ philanthropic donations have gone to support efforts in sustainability, conservation, and restoration. He has mentioned that this next pledge will include supporting space exploration, the arts, and continued Earth preservation efforts.
Frank White’s theory of the Overview Effect has helped provide astronauts with concepts and language to articulate the profound shift in worldview they experience when viewing the Earth from space and in space. Now, much of the world has adopted this framework in describing our innate interconnectedness.
His book, The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution, is considered by many to be a seminal work in the field of space exploration, making him one of the most influential space philosophers of our time.
**Learn More About the Overview Effect** →
Frank White is the founder of the Human Space Program, which serves as the founding organization of this coalition.
Jeff Bezos was born in 1964. Just five years later, Apollo 11 landed on the moon, inspiring the five-year-old Bezos to dedicate his life to spaceflight.
In 1972, Gerard K. O'Neill’s work at Space Studies Institute (SSI) was inspired by the book "The Limits to Growth", which was created by a team at MIT, led by Jay Forrester. Among the team were David and Laura Peterson, founders of Ventana Systems. The book concluded that civilization here on Earth was doomed within a few more generations at most, after increasing population used up all the natural resources of our planet.
Bezos attended Princeton, where he was president of Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS) at the same time O’Neill was there. He has cited O'Neill's signature book on human communities in space, "The High Frontier," as a major influence. Through Blue Origin, Bezos is developing detailed plans to realize O’Neill’s vision.
Bezos gave his 1982 high school valedictorian speech on the topic of space communities and SSI. His talk included an emphasis on the environmental benefits to Earth of human expansion into the solar ecosystem. In 1983, Frank White, also inspired by O’Neill’s work, delivered a paper at SSI called “Understanding Space Settlements as Human Systems.”
Sometime around 1984, White took a cross-country flight that led to an epiphany: people living in an O’Neill community would have an “Overview” of the Earth, seeing it as a whole system in which everything is interconnected and interrelated.
White began interviewing astronauts as proxies for these future space people, and the first public mention of the Overview Effect occurred at a poster session for SSI’s 1985 annual conference. By then, White had begun writing The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution. The book was published by Houghton-Mifflin in 1987.
In the book, he explored the concepts that later led to the development of The Human Space Program (HSP): “A central project to develop a citizen-authored blueprint for conscious space migration and stewardship of the solar ecosystem.”
Today, HSP is working directly with Ventana Systems to develop Large-Scale Space Migration (LSSM) simulations (and other scenarios) based on the work of Forrester, O’Neill, and Bezos.
The Human Space Program is leading a coalition of space and environmental nonprofits to help Jeff and Lauren become successful philanthropists. Not only can we help them donate wisely but we can also ensure that the funds will be used to realize Bezos’ dream of millions of people living and working in space.
Together, the HSP-led coalition is weaving together a tapestry of the future for Large-Scale Space Migration to ensure that Earth’s carrying capacity is restored.
We are now inviting organizations to be part of the coalition. If you are interested in joining the coalition or in nominating another organization, please fill out the form below.
The Human Space Program is helping form a pool of exceptional candidates for Jeff and Lauren to consider supporting through their philanthropic funding. HSP is not acting as a judge and will not be managing the funding. Those decisions will be in the hands of Jeff and Lauren.
If you are not seeking funding, but are interested in supporting this coalition effort as a for-profit or individual, please contact us to begin the conversation.
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScofKxC-Q_XnCFYatP9DjfWXx0sw_cZ0ZgB8FQuA93l-YamYA/viewform