Zuckbucks, The (Potential) End of the World & The New (Potential) Future Worlds
Howdy and Happy Friday!
Below are a few things I've been chewing on this week.
I've been listening to The End of the World with Josh Clark. Every episode is a different way the world could end. One episode talks about the explosion of the world's population. This got me googling, stumbling across some wild graphs, predicting a potentially unsustainable growth trajectory. "It took over 200,000 years of human history for the world's population to reach 1 billion; and only 200 years more to reach 7 billion".
If Earth does get too over-populated, one option for us is to go to outer space. In a fascinating article about "What Jeff Bezos Wants", the concept of moving to Outer Space is discussed, primarily through Bezos' space company, Blue Origin. Bezos was inspired as a kid, after reading The High Frontier (link to the book on Amazon - meta) to go to space for exploration, to solve for over-population and to have the earth be one giant National Park - sounds like a cool future.
Another option, if the world becomes too over-populated, is to simply "live" in Facebook's Virtual Reality World, which is set to launch in 2020. It's pretty wild to envision what this could lead to, and has crazy features, like having "human guides, known as Horizon Locals, who can give users assistance and protect their safety in the VR world so trolls can’t run rampant". Here is the official teaser video.
Speaking of Facebook... Wednesday, Mark Zuckerberg went to Congress to discuss Libra, the potential digital currency that FB will take part in creating. "Within minutes, however, it became clear lawmakers would expand the focus of the hearing to include a wide range of concerns about Facebook". So, if you look on google/youtube, you'll mostly find clips of Zuckerberg getting grilled by Congress on issues around FB, not anything to do with Libra. This video actually shows a good line of questioning around Libra, if you're interested.
Finally, and completely unrelated, if you've ever wondered how certain "top level domains" (".com", ".edu", ".org", and also crazy ones) get started and who owns them/can sell them, check out this podcast episode of My First Million. The guy has a super fun story too.
See you next week when I see you!
Cheers,