That has a real chance of existing? Something with clean power.
That I really want? Replicators. Man think about a life not having to cook or clean dishes.
Guessing not the replicators from sg1.
So many stupid problems could be resolved with miniaturized fusion cells
Earth unity. Whatever they did to make humans stop attacking each other was crazy.
We probably need another species to compete against to unite us. I’d put Billions into nasa to find aliens so we can fight them.
We probably need another species to compete against to unite us.
Nah, the US would use it as an excuse to demand a world government under their control.
I’m only downvoting you because that’s basically what OP said, not be cause you’re wrong.
If we controlled the world government, then what are all these politicians who run on a platform of exposing the secret government that already controls the world going to do?
That Venutian amoeba will have to take one for the team. OUR team.
Another species is very useful for unity, not necessarily for us to band together against, but because a proper intelligent alien kind of invalidates every religion. All the conflicts from culture clashing suddenly become pointless.
Or at least racists will have something else to look down on.
Throughout history men have joined with their enemies to kill their neighbors. Cortez had an army of native Americans with him to take down the Aztecs.
When the aliens show up and demand who’s responsible for why our societies are such shitshows, all we have to do is point towards the fancy neighborhoods
Dump all the billions into AI controlled nuclear weapons
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.
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.
Two chicks at the same time.
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.
Chicks dig guys with money!
Good point. I’m going with “giant robot”. Chicks dig giant robots.
Bacta Tanks. Maybe a few days in one would fix my back.
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.
Naa I want a Sarcophagus from Stargate.
Although only use it when you need it.
I would fund a truly fair AI and a very gentle, but firm, self replicating robot army to enforce it’s benevolent will on everyone.
So basically SkyNet, after I make a pointer arithmetic mistake.
Stupid integer overflow!
Ive been thinking for years that if we could put the (absolutely enormous) privacy concerns aside think of the environmental benefit of every major city in the world having an “AI” controlling the traffic lights and variable speed limits. Using numberplate recognition cameras and gps on every vehicle to optimise flow, reduce bottlenecks and minimise time spent in traffic.
That won’t work because you’re approaching the problem from the wrong angle; you’re trying to “fix” traffic by encouraging more traffic. If you want to improve car traffic the only possible solution is to make other forms of transport more appealing. It doesn’t really matter which form of transport you focus on, it could be trains, busses, bikes, walkability, etc; just as long as you ensure it’s as or more efficient than a car for the majority of journeys.
The only way to fix traffic is for there to be less traffic.
Well you arent wrong but its not like its a “pick one” situation. With the unbiased data from the AI you could optimise all forms of transport. If you can see that theres clearly a lot of people driving from point A to point B you can examine the why and implement better solutions.
Society wastes a great deal of time looking for the perfect solution while some good ones sit right under our nose. If the AI solution has a city of 1 million drivers saving 5 minutes each way on an average commute of an hour. Thats the equivalent of 166k cars not driving that day and everyone saves 10 minutes.
An end to the problem of aging, and death. Whether that means turning into cyborgs, I don’t care. I just want to choose when I die. Not having dying slowly happen to me like a terminal illness. Plus life is way too short. If I get tired of immortality let me off myself. But let me at least get tired of it first.
Have you ever heard of de’beers diamond hoarding story. Thats like what i expect would happen to humanity if we gained the ability to live forever, ‘manufactured scarcity’.
A tumultuous time of oligarchic rule with infighting to control the life extending technology. Eventually ending in a winner take all dictatorship. The masses would never see their lives extended (greener pastures visions may be made in the beginning). In fact common peoples lifespans would likely shorten as the controlling elite no longer required the same sort of widespread healthcare present even at todays standards, (depending upon where you live).
The elite would form a supplicant circle around the eventual dictator who maintains control, drip feeding the life extending technology to those who serve their dictatorship best.
Within a couple generations they won’t be a dictator but our Monarch, and the common people will obey, and descend to a miserable condition.
I may have let my imagination loose today a bit…
A fully open source tech manufacturing company such as chips, gpu, ram, motherboard, connectors, ssd .etc you get the idea.
I’ve been thinking along the same lines lately. A fully open source hardware and software architecture and implementation, to replace the closed “old world”.
Hell yeah but it is all a pipe dream anyway cause no corpo or billionaire is gonna do it.
I imagine it would probably take someone obscenely rich choosing not to be rich anymore in order to make it happen. Which seems unlikely.
Unlikely is putting it mildly
The fiction part would kind of keep me from doing that. And I fully believe that everything that actually is possible is already being worked on as quickly as possible.
So, maybe just pay for a whole lot of renewable energy plants all around the globe. Buy up all fossil fuel plants, demolish them and put in renewables instead.
Or fund a fully open smartphone with modular components like a PC with good specs and an optional keyboard.
Oh, I know. I’d start up a Dyson swarm to beam sunlight directly to my power plants. That should be possible.
Space based receivers right? Because otherwise that can go badly pretty quickly
I fully believe that everything that actually is possible is already being worked on as quickly as possible.
That’s either very optimistic about our level of knowledge about the universe, or a purely semantic thing where you count the precursor technology of another technology that would eventually be the major breakthrough as “already being worked on”…
For the phone, I’d like to point you to Fairphone. I’m not sure specs are the best, and I don’t know about keyboard modules but other than that, it’s pretty much there.
Consciousness storage and transfer
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.
I’d like to support solarpunk development. I just want to live a simple life, with high tech in cooperation with the environment. We need it badly. Don’t misunderstand me though. I still want space travel, but I no longer trust capitalists with it.
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.
Yeah they deal with that in the book series. Lots of AI who do space traffic routing space ships around the beams so as not to get fried.
It’s also used as a weapon in the books to defend the solar system. Fune books. I read em once a year or so.
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?
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.
Also clean energy but personally virtual reality 100%. Give me that SAO experience, damn it. Just without y’know the bad stuff
Edit: mandatory Link
