If tomorrow you woke up as an eccentric billionaire–the type found in many works of sci-fi fiction (and increasingly in real life too)–what moonshot idea would you pursue?
This is intended purely as a fun, hypothetical question. Real-life people who are in possession of that amount of wealth are the subject of controversy (the taxes they don’t pay, and the good they could do, etc), and if you don’t mind, I’d like to put that aside for the purposes of this post.
This question occurred to me while reading the novel Recursion recently (and again while reading Dark Matter, which I’m working through now), and it resulted in some fun Thanksgiving dinner conversations. Here are the two sci-fi ideas I’d be interested in pursuing:
- Stasis hibernation (cryosleep): I like this the best because of the sheer number of positive implications and opportunities it presents. First, it would instantly open doors for deep-space travel. Second, it’s effectively the same as one-way time travel to the future. Third, it gives anyone time to cure a currently incurable disease, even if you need to enter hibernation for years or decades.
- Portals/teleportation: Researchers have already duplicated the quantum state of a quark across a short distance, so it’s not completely impossible that we may see some form of teleportation someday. The best version of it would be linked portals that people could walk through. Imagine the impact on tourism, small businesses, and (again) deep space travel–just plop a portal down on the moon, Mars, or some faraway Earth-like planet, and you can walk through your city’s gate all the way across the galaxy. A more “likely” version would allow you to send and receive inanimate objects through the portal, which would still be pretty amazing.
There are many, many other sci-fi tropes and concepts that you could pursue as an eccentric billionaire–which would you choose?
Well, ya wrecked what I was going to say by asking us to set aside the part about the good we could do, so I guess I’d have to give that money over to my husband. He loves sci fi and space/rocket stuff.
I would put money into the machines that build layers of skin, human tissue, and organs. To rebuild amputees, burn victims, and people that need transplants. Why not just a dr machine kit. That heals everything. Now imagine if people lived longer, it sounds great, but that leads to population increase. Many problems that would create. Housing crisis. Global warming/pollution. Interesting thoughts Jamey. My first thought when you said teleportation was the Michael Crichton book timeline. Teleporting to another time. Turning people into a code and teleporting them. Would it still be the same person. On the other end. God plot for a sci fi horror movie.
Just so long as your cryo/stasis thing ends up being better than the Low Passage from Traveller.
We don’t want any Low Lotteries running on some futuristic QANTAS.