Humans will have to leave the Earth and the planet will become just a "residential" zone, according to Amazon boss Jeff Bezos.

The coming years will see much of the heavy industry on Earth moved onto other planets, the moons and even asteroids, he has suggested. Our planet will be reserved for "residential and light industrial" uses, he said.

To get to that future, Mr Bezos hopes to have his rocket company Blue Origin join with Nasa and the European Space Agency to establish a colony on the Moon, he told a space conference. Doing so should be relatively easy, since the moon is fairly near to us and has a store of water that could be used to create fuel.

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He hopes that other organisations will eventually take up those projects, working to establish places for humans to live on the Moon. But his company stands ready to help out if it does not happen quickly enough, he said.

In the short term, Mr Bezos and his company hope to simply reduce the cost of getting to space, and will soon launch ships aimed at launching rockets that can carry people up into space. Unlike SpaceX – set up by fellow technology billionaire Elon Musk – Blue Origin does not aim to head to Mars but is concentrating on more nearby destinations.

Eventually, those rockets could carry people up to space so that there are millions of people living and working off Earth. People might opt to stay on our planet, which will become a residential zone, but they will not have to, he said.

“We will have to leave this planet,” Mr Bezos said, according to Geek Wire. “We’re going to leave it, and it’s going to make this planet better. We’ll come and go, and the people who want to stay, will stay.”

All of the heavy industry will leave, and will be conducted in space using solar energy, he suggested.

“The Earth is not a very good place to do heavy industry. It’s convenient for us right now,” he said. “But in the not-too-distant future — I’m talking decades, maybe 100 years — it’ll start to be easier to do a lot of the things that we currently do on Earth in space, because we’ll have so much energy.”

The plans to establish a colony on the moon serves as a bridge between the short-term work on the new rockets and the long-term plan to help humanity leave the Earth. By establishing a colony on our nearest neighbour, we would be able to begin our journey towards living in space – and that could be conducted by a range of different organisations, both public and private, all at once.

“The Moon Village concept has a nice property in that everybody basically just says, look, everybody builds their own lunar outpost, but let’s do it close to each other," he said. "That way, if you need a cup of sugar, you can go over to the European Union lunar outpost and say, ‘I got my powdered eggs, what have you got?'