Arcologies or greenhouse super domes for food production of any kind wherever it’s desired
Or carbon nanotube mass production so we can build mile-high connected super structures
Not so much technology, but I’d fund the Howard Society for real. For those unfamiliar, it’s a program to identify people who are genetically predisposed to natural long life and pay them to have kids with each other; it’s a core plot point in a bunch of Heinlein novels.
Isn’t that just eugenics with extra steps?
It’s actually eugenics without extra steps!
genetically engineered housing
We can all live in big fuck-off mushrooms like the Telvanni showed us
Space based mirrors for asteroid mining. Bounce a sh*tton of light from the sun around and just melt asteroids. Love that in the Troy Rising series.
Lots of problems getting there irl (need a better way to get out of the gravity well, and light speed lag for command and control would be a real issue) but the idea is just too fun.
That sounds like a great way to accidentally muzzle sweep a thousand international satellites with a billion-kWh laser beam. Not saying it’s entirely a bad idea, but having invisible unshielded beams of stupendous energy bouncing all over the solar system sounds like a recipe for a couple accidental meltings. I could just see someone making an adjustment to the next mining target without informing China and whoops, that secret manned satellite you sent up a couple months ago is now slag.
Depends how it’s focused. It wouldn’t be a straight coherent beam, because that would actually break thermodynamics if you could produce it from sunlight.
Ooh, this is new info. How so?
Two chicks at the same time.
I know that not most woman aren’t in to a men just for his money, but the kinda chicks who will double up on a guy like me are!
Great! You still have billions of dollars left.
People make this sound way harder to achieve than it actually is. There’s even people who are poly for free. I don’t know how many do group sex but it’s not none, and theoretically you could be one of them.
Go watch Office Space, dude.
Is that where it’s from? I knew it was a meme, but I just thought I’d bring up that it’s a weird one, given it’s in the responses to every question like this.
Back in its time it was an insanely popular movie and most everyone knew a few quotes from it, at least. That was one of the most remembered ones.
Somebody tell us the dude’s cousin’s story. Usually you need a certain level of privilege to drop out.
Chicks dig guys with money!
Well yeah… but we call them gold diggers, not chicks.
Asteroid mining. This may still be too far off and too expensive. But the first person to get this working successfully will be a trillionare.
This plus fusion are the two things most needed to transition humanity to a space based civilization.
And that is something to inspire to? Look at the world right now, with billions of people having almost no money at all.
Or it’ll be a gold rush situation where that guy will break even, but the people selling him rocket fuel will make a modest fortune. It’s all dependent on how expensive the shipping method invented is.
Asteroid mining is incompatible with current capitalism. Say you harvest an asteroid with 100,000 of platinum in it. You in theory now have trollions of dollars in platinum for the $40 billion you spent harvesting the asteroid, only you have now quadrupled the amount of platinum in the economy, crayering the price and totally ruining your company. It’s obviously a net good for humanity as a scarce resource is now abundant, but it is bad for capitalism because the ones who finaced the work are the biggest loser.
No you’ve got it backward. The mining is a cover. You look for celestial bodies that require only a small delta-v to redirect to a collision event.
It’s a proper hostage situation, once you’ve got the infrastructure to replicate it more cheaply than people can defend against it.
This would be a really cool idea for a novel or mini-series IMO.
Oh yeah. I’d consult on that for sure. Tricking Silicon Valley to invest in something that then holds Earth hostage instead. Fun plot.
…although I bet they’d still invest if you just told them. As long as the financials work.
I think if mining economy worked like that, Saudi Arabia would have gone bankrupt by cratering the price of oil.
Oil jas constant demand and the Saudis have so much of it that it costs them very little to drill for it and store it. And digging a new well doesn’t immediately flood the market with 4x the annual production of oil.
I’m not arguing against asteroid mining. I am saying that it is fundamentally impossible under our current capitalist system. That’s why there has been zero advances in the concept in iver a decade.
I did some googling and math. Global platinum market is 8 million oz a year. Current spot price is ~$900. That’s $7T per year. They would have a monopoly and be able to shut down all mines by undercutting the price selling at say $800/oz. If it cost $40 Billion to mine the asteroid, that means it would take 7 years to pay back the cost.
7 year payback is short for businesses. Commercial Solar is installed despite having a 10 year payback.
Cybernetics hands down.
Also clean energy but personally virtual reality 100%. Give me that SAO experience, damn it. Just without y’know the bad stuff
- Space tether.
- Nuclear fusion.
- Home assistant robots
Do I have to choose one? The world food program is never overfunded, and that would buy a stupid amount of lobbying for whatever overlooked domestic issue, or even just research grants for neglected but foundational things. Boring/ugly animals could also use conservation.
Maybe we understood the question differently: are you saying that if you could choose between researching Star Trek’s food replicator and feeding people for a day, you’d choose fish?
No. And cool wording by the way.
Assuming 100% success, yeah, replicators would be a great choice. Or maybe that skin cream that fixes everything including intangible life problems from that one short. Assuming actual science stuff, benevolent AI maybe, so we don’t have to worry about the other kind, and so it can hopefully research everything else.
Giving it all away to mutual aid groups to have them figure out local issues.
How about a UBI? Do social policies count as technologies? They do in 4X games, so I’m going with it.
I would categorize UBI as a policy/law, more than a tech thing.
Bacta Tanks. Maybe a few days in one would fix my back.
Naa I want a Sarcophagus from Stargate.
Although only use it when you need it.
I’d invest my billions with this guy
Nano-tech medicine, for sure. Injectable swarms of individually dumb, tiny robots which are controlled by an external AI doctor.
Antigravity, Durasteel, shields, cold fusion, nanotech, time travel, warp, dimension sliding/hopping, mind mapping, cryo sleep, teleportation, Positronic brain, …
This basically covers it, I’ll add replicators and holodecks
Very important…
Star Trek or Stargate replicators…
Indeed!
I’ll leave it to the genie to decide
Yes, how could I miss those!!
Faster-than-light travel. Which is physically impossible, but whatever.
Physically impossible as per our current understanding of physics, mathematics, and technology.
Maybe not, if we where to find a cheat way with wormholes.
