71–80 of 174 posts
Two chicks at the same time. Seriously, I have no idea what I'd do with that amount of money. If I was completely selfish maybe I'd buy an island somewhere. I sure as hell wouldn't use it to bail out a bunch of failed businesses whose executives have been giving themselves multi-million dollar bonuses.
Build the world's largest super computer. Then ask it what the meaning of life is.
BSOD
I'd buy a sovereign country and break it up into city-states, and allow them to compete with each other as an experiment to see which policies and forms of government are the most effective. It would be kind of like Pokemon for social science geeks. You could have libertaritopia, commietopia, fascistopia, etc, and you'd get to see what happens. For motivational purposes, after 50 years I would have barbarian hordes b…
Don't we already have a bunch of states competing with each other as an experiment to see what form is the most effective?
Buy off the government. Mostly dismantle it.
Compact self-contained hydroponic gardens (think shipping container).
Build a space elevator and start mining the asteroids. This involves a robot army that would need to be built as well. No, I'm not joking
Build a space elevator and start mining the asteroids. This involves a robot army that would need to be built as well. No, I'm not joking
Wow I was thinking the exact same thing. Put the money into an Apollo-scale project to perfect the 1st gen space elevator. Most of the money would go to research. The price of building it once you have the know-how is a trivially small amount of the total $700 billion.
NASA is a horrible organization to actually get things done. I wouldn't emulate them. Burt Rutan is a hero.