Jeff Bezos has spent the past 36 years thinking about how to launch us all into space. Bezos may be best known as the CEO of e-commerce giant Amazon and as the world's richest person, with a net worth of $165 billion, per Bloomberg's latest estimate. But, the billionaire's private aerospace company, Blue Origin, might be Bezos' true passion project based on the subject of the speech he delivered at this 1982 high school graduation. That year, Bezos was preparing to attend Princeton University, where he would study electrical engineering and computer science. At Miami's Palmetto High school, Bezos had finished first in a class of 680 students, and so he was chosen to speak at his class' graduation. The Miami Herald printed a roundup of speeches from local high school valedictorians in an article published on June 20, 1982. The Herald included a few sentences summarizing Bezos' address, which now serves as proof that the future tech industry titan has been thinking for years about the future of civilization in space. "[Bezos] wants to build space hotels, amusement parks, yachts and colonies for two or three million people orbiting around the earth," the Herald's article says. "'The whole idea is to preserve the earth,'" he said, according to the newspaper, which notes of Bezos that his "final objective is to get all people off the earth and see it turned into a huge national park."

Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos in 1997 Paul Souders | Hulton Archive | Getty Images