Year One: Use $1 billion to set myself up in comfort - multiple homes, private plane, bolt-hole stocked with independent power and food storage for several years in a rural part of the western US. Liquidate $4 billion at the expense of another $4 billion, give a billion each to the four leading fusion startups so they can try to bootstrap up to a functional plant.
Year Two: Donate - don't liquidate, donate the assets themselves - $87 billion to three foundations, and specifically to what are called "Donor-Advised Funds". Those allow you to keep your privacy, don't require the foundation to spend 5% of the amount per year (which would run afoul of the liquidation penalty), and allow you to keep providing some say over it.
A copy-cat of the American Legislative Exchange Council (the Koch Bros' instrument of choice), but focused on climate change efforts when lobbying and pressuring US state politicians. There is a ton of room for state-by-state climate change efforts in the US, and state politicians are the low-hanging fruit - you can't donate to their campaigns directly, but you can aggressively lobby and court them with special retreats, etc. ($30 billion)
A fund for supporting research to ameliorate climate change. A big focus would be on carbon capture and storage research (especially air capture), but we'd also fund other efforts. That way, we're not just duplicating the research done by the big research money already. ($30 billion)
A fund for promoting space research and missions. $270 million/year isn't much, but if you do a robotic program focused on getting a high flight rate and maximum research at the cost of making any individual spacecraft more prone to failure (say, a 25% accepted failure rate vs 5%) you can get a lot done on that amount while also helping to make space launch cheaper (meaning easier for space solar startups, etc). ($27 billion).
Keep about $4 billion for myself. That puts me below the "head on a stick" threshold, and gives me $40 million a year to live off of. Unless I turn into an obsessive collector or home buyer (or accumulate a large parasitic entourage), that's more than enough to live a super-luxurious rich person life-style and occasionally splash around some extra political donations if I'm getting too close to the $5 billion level.
]]>Or the reverse - selectively enhancing certain desires while suppressing others?
]]>-You don't spin the whole spacecraft, just a cylinder (or better a pair of cylinders rotating in counter directions) inside of the ship.
-It's really not a stretch to imagine that a spacecraft meant to effectively establish a new human civilization in another solar system would be so huge that it would contain all kinds of fabrication and recycling plants. I'd honestly expect much of the ship to be replaced part-by-part over the years, something you'd have to do anyways with space colonies.
You wouldn't land its landers on an improvised landing spot. You'd send down robots and possibly an automated propellant manufacturing plant (something they've been discussing for Mars missions like Mars Direct) first, and then follow up with landings.
Stick a giant piece of ice on the front of the spacecraft. Ice is good for absorbing impacts and radiation.
I honestly don't know enough about closed-cycle ecological systems to saying anything about whether they'd work or not. Probably depends on how big your spacecraft ultimately is.
@Frank Landis I'll give you a hint of an answer: if you could bundle all the current political troublemakers in a generation ship and send them off to Trappist-1D (Alpha Centauri being too close, and not having a documented planet), would you do it?
Not if I thought they'd survive.
]]>RE: Heteromeles
I really liked how KSR had the economic system in 2312 be a messy melange of things reflecting political and cultural evolution. There's elements of capitalism, elements of a market economy that's in the "gray market" area, and a cooperative par-econ set-up with advanced computers. Barring violent revolution, that's how I'd expect an evolution away from capitalism to kind of look like.
SF and Space Fantasy tend to have too "neat", uniform political systems that don't reflect a complicated history of political evolution. I wouldn't expect stuff like that unless there's been a sweeping revolution or several that broadly carved out lots of older rules and homogenized the new ones.
]]>But in general, Star Wars is like Dune, where the creator and later Lucasbooks contrived a bunch of in-universe reasons for why everything is the way it is. The dogfighting is all close up because the ships are capable of traveling at a significant fraction of light speed even while going faster than light, and shooting from a distance means you'd never. The Death Star's huge tunnels make more sense - imagine how much easier they make moving big machinery around for repairs and parts replacement.
@72 Murchushio
Dwarven reproduction works for me. It's explicitly said that they breed slowly as a result of it, but it's compensated for in part because they also live longer than Men (implied 200-300 years). All the wars and dislocations have seriously reduced their numbers by the Third Age.
I agree on the climate problems. The Blue Mountains should be casting a rain shadow as well over Eriador, meaning most of Eriador should be drier than it is now (unless they're getting a lot of winter storms off of the Bay of Forochel), and the area east of the Misty Mountains should be steppe or desert (Rhun is implied to be steppe). Maybe Tolkien was going off of Eurasia as a model, which has steppe turning to temperate forest turning to taiga the further you go north.
@Charlie Stross
No, really: what is this thing called a job, and what is it doing in my post-scarcity interplanetary future?
Given how often SF and Space Fantasy loves its Space Aristocrats, you'd think they'd be more inclined to look at the behavior of aristocrats as a model for luxury robot socialism societies where nobody has to work. That's how I've always assumed we'd behave in such a situation, assuming we're still Human As We Them (meaning no extensive augmentation or transhumanism). We'd spend our days enjoying luxury and entertainment, getting in petty squabbles, and competing in all kinds of games and status stuff in a hierarchy.
]]>Agreed on the biofuels for air travel. What would really be revolutionary, though, would be if we could get full electric battery planes capable of carrying 100-200 passengers. Electricity is a lot cheaper than fossil fuel, to the point where if we had such planes it might be cheaper to do more short trips with stops/transfers versus the long distance flights that are best when you're running the planes on fuel.
]]>Please note that the following scenario assumes that what we are witnessing is deliberate and planned and that the people in Trump's inner circle actually have a coherent objective they are working towards.
What news has been (constantly) leaking out into the political press here indicates otherwise. Trump barely bothered to read any of the executive orders given to him to sign, they're lurching from one crisis to the next, his people casually lie and get caught in it later on, he rambles crap on Twitter regardless of the consequences - and so on. It's an entire administration of short-term opportunists with poor quality preparation.
]]>It's going to be so much fun trying to assemble a Democratic campaign in the face of Republican vote suppression going forward, overseen by judges appointed by Republicans in Congress. And being in America, having a hard-right Supreme Court can really screw over progressive reforms for years and even decades (just look at the Court in the early 20th century before the late 1930s). Women's reproductive rights will be the first casualty.
]]>Something like Musk's launcher would make space solar a potentially viable operation, at least if you could build a solar power array that could "unfold" in space once it's at the right orbit. Build the ground array in a low-populated area, build the transmission lines, and now you've got a good way to supplement ground power supplies.
Personally, I'd love to build a long-axis space station using it. Put a space station in orbit attached along a central truss, spin it up for gravity, then just keep adding segments lengthwise for more room.
]]>But you're still positing a worldwide "gap" in which we can lose that knowledge, lose our ability to re-create and store information, and it rots aways before we can re-discover. Like I said in my post, I don't see that happening - even if we had a massive die-off on large stretches of the world, information stored and re-transmitted in the handful of remaining advanced, urbanized areas means it gets saved and cycled back in.
You're relying on the deep past too much as a precedent for what's going forwards. Things have fundamentally changed - even if the means of storage are more fragile, our ability to save information as long as civilization continues somewhere has gotten vastly easier. We're in unknown territory, where the main barrier to the preservation of knowledge is whether somebody continues it worthwhile to continue storing and migrating the data into new storage.
]]>That changes the preservation of memory and technology going forward. You'd have to posit a total collapse, down to hunter-gatherer levels, to the point where by the time they re-discover literacy they can no longer read the writings and inscriptions left over. And it would have to be world-wide, because otherwise the areas that don't collapse as much will preserve it and cycle it back in. It's something I don't see happening even in the higher-end projections of climate change.
@troutwaxer
I think Musk is going to find a paucity of people who actually want to live permanently on Mars when they find out that "live on Mars" means "spend most of your time in a nearly window-less habitat either underground or made of Martian bricks, tending life support systems and only going outside in space suits". Lots of scientists willing to go on rotation for a few years or more, but permanent colonists? I doubt it will be enough to make a viable colony, and that's assuming that none of them come back.
A lot of the romanticism of places like Mars is because it's so far away in space. It'll be a lot less romantic once humans have been there.
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