Petition To Prevent Amazon's Jeff Bezos From Returning to Earth Gets More 20,000 Signatures

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is headed to space with his brother Mark for the maiden crewed flight of New Shepard, the ship built by Bezos' Blue Origin company. Ahead of the launch, someone started an online petition "To Not Allow Jeff Bezos Re-Entry To Earth," thus exiling the billionaire to space for good. The Change.org petition explains its reasons for wanting to keep Bezos from returning to his home planet, noting a handful of conspiracy-theory style stories, making the petition into a kind of epic troll of the Amazon founder.

"Jeff Bezos is actually Lex Luthor, disguised as the supposed owner of a super successful online retail store," the petition reads (via CNET). "However, he's actually an evil overlord hellbent on global domination. We've known this for years. Jeff has worked with the Epsteins and the Knights Templar, as well as the Free Masons to gain control over the whole world. He's also in bed with the flat earth deniers; it's the only way they'll allow him to leave the atmosphere. Meanwhile, our government stands by and lets it happen."

The petition concludes, "This may be our last chance before they enable the 5G microchips and perform a mass takeover."

Joke petitions aside, if all goes to plan, Bezos will make his flight on July 20 on New Shepard, a suborbital rocket which means that the entire flight from launch to landing will last around 15 minutes and will take passengers to the outer reaches of the atmosphere, soaring over 60 miles above the Earth.

But Bezos isn't the only billionaire attempting to make it to space. Virgin Group head Richard Branson is also looking to the stars and is reportedly trying to move up his already scheduled trip to space onboard Virgin Galactic's VSS Unity SpaceShipTwo rocket plane for the July 4th weekend in order to beat Bezos to become the "first billionaire in space".

"We are in the process of analyzing the data from our successful May 22nd flight," " a Virgin Galactic spokesman said in a statement to Parabolic Arc. "As previously announced, we expect to complete the final test flights this summer through to early fall. At this time, we have not determined the date of our next flight. An objective from the last flight was to collect data to be used for the final two verification reports that are required as part of the current FAA commercial reusable spacecraft operator's license."

What do you think about the petition to keep Bezos from returning to Earth after his trip into space aboard Blue Origin's New Shepard? Let us know in the comments.

Photo: ERIC BARADAT/AFP via Getty Images