What exotic science fiction technology would you finance research into, if you had billions of dollars?

So many stupid problems could be resolved with miniaturized fusion cells

That I really want? Replicators. Man think about a life not having to cook or clean dishes.

Drug addicted, Mafia made, trash fed makers from Transmetropolitan, specifically.

Guessing not the replicators from sg1.

Cooking is super fun tho

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.

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.

That Venutian amoeba will have to take one for the team. OUR team.

Dump all the billions into AI controlled nuclear weapons

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

Now Mr Ozymandius with this one cool trick you don't even need to find the aliens.

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".

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.

And that is something to inspire to? Look at the world right now, with billions of people having almost no money at all.

This seems like it would never be lucrative in any way shape or form.

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.

Chicks dig guys with money!

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.

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...

Honestly I'd be horrified knowing that without aging, a traumatic, fatal, accident becomes more and more likely as time passes to the point of being inevitable. Always on edge for that moment when it all suddenly comes to an end.

Nano-tech medicine, for sure. Injectable swarms of individually dumb, tiny robots which are controlled by an external AI doctor.

I'd invest my billions with this guy

Naa I want a Sarcophagus from Stargate.

Although only use it when you need it.

I would categorize UBI as a policy/law, more than a tech thing.

Make them open and close in a circular pattern like a camera aperture and I'm in

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.

Stupid integer overflow!

Is Cancer age related? I thought it could happen to anyone. But much more likely to happen when your older.

You might want to pull out your wallet...

Physically impossible as per our current understanding of physics, mathematics, and technology.

Maybe not, if we where to find a cheat way with wormholes.

I'll add mine here then. Cat Girl genetic engineering. It helps no one but the amount of non destructive upheavel from it be easy available would be entertaining.

Don't worry, I'm here to help :)

I see this very much as another Pandora's box situation for humanity. Once it's open, both good and bad things can come of it.

The bad being, brain hacking, brain ransome, and perhaps a few other things. You mention a "nondestructive brain machine," but I can't comprehend how anyone will be able to make an implant that could be engineered not to be destructible and still have uber computing power in such a small form. But who knows what advancements are in store this century?

The good, as you mentioned would be, enabling the disabled in many ways never fully realized before. Both personal and professional productivity across the board, in theory, would greatly be improved.

Man I always watned that, but it woudl have to be an open-source program, becuase I will not pay by having adds in my own mind

Oh, I know. I'd start up a Dyson swarm to beam sunlight directly to my power plants. That should be possible.

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.

But they'd just realize we are all garbage and then gray goo the entire earth

FISH!

I'd say budget 3D printed meals are around the corner.

Proper gourmet replicated meals, 60yrs.

Replicators! Yes!!

Some restaurants probably will still exist as a premium option. And chefs can create recipes and sell them online.

They'll probably add DRM to it. Crap! 😬

Farmers would also loose their jobs.

How far off do you think we are from this becoming a reality?

This basically covers it, I'll add replicators and holodecks

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.

The terror usually doesn't end when the dictator dies today he just gets replaced by the next in line, but even, having the entire human race go old and suffer until death to alleviate the dictator problem is maybe not the best way to do it?

that's a no on the cruciform for me, dawg. Yeesh. I'll take everything else from there though, Poulsen, hawking drive, farcasters (maybe without the yoke of the AI techno core though), etc.

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?

Lemons are already combustible?

Propulsion system for space adaptation? So high pressure farts?

Isn't that just eugenics with extra steps?

I read an ieee paper a few years ago that went into why photonic computing failed and why it won't ever succeed.

The problem is that photons are fat compared to electrons so circuits couldn't be made as small as they are already today. When cmos was 500 nm and researchers weren't sure if things could be made smaller, photonics made sense. But now they're at 3nm process (yes it is a marketing label, but pitch is 24 nm ) . Visible light has a wavelength of 400nm. The wave function of a photon would smear across circuits that small.

We can all live in big fuck-off mushrooms like the Telvanni showed us

Perhaps the main use for technology is increasing the amount of inequality society can tolerate without collapse. I can’t fix inequality – that just seems to be what the humans want.

However by investing in surveillance technology, computer vision, and AI I could perhaps help our society to bear unbounded amounts of inequality indefinitely, without collapse. Social collapse is a less-than-zero-sum game, whereas an unequal society is still generally more-than-zero-sum. So I posit that the latter is objectively better.

... Are you suggesting that we increase inequality to make the world better? Like we need an overlord, be it robot or human, and the rest of the population needs to be placated, worked to the bone, and easily replaced?

I gotta assume I am just vastly misunderstanding something in this argument, but I cannot for the life of me figure out what it is. Is it just sarcastic?