How billionaires spend their money

[El Pollo Diablo]

Everything's on fire, but that's okay, let's try to make the world even more overpopulated with humans than it already is, that's not a total waste of time and money and effort when it could be better spent on, I don't know, cooling everything down

https://www.theguardian.com/science/202 ... ng-process

[plodder]

Any economy is skewed towards whatever people want to spend money on. When you concentrate money in the hands of a few people the entire economy skews round their wishes. This is really profound because the economy drives efficiencies in *everything*. What happens is that the stuff most people want becomes relatively less efficient over time because the focus is skewed towards luxury goods.

[Woodchopper]

In case any of you haven't heard of it, this is a great radio series/podcast which looks at how Musk and other billionaires vanity projects are influenced by classic scifi novels that they read as kids. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000xdxc (BBC series)
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/e ... 1591294233 (Podcast)

[Sciolus]

I always hoped cryogenics would take off. Get the rich to freeze themselves until we had a cure for death, and then accidentally forget to unfreeze them.

[Trinucleus]

They've probably watched Bill Gates set up his foundation and do good for the world, only to be slaughtered by conspiracy theorists

[TopBadger]

The thing is - I expect these guys would be horrified if we still had the society of Victorian times... i.e. to give up on the the advancement and evolution of society since.

Yet, that's probably what would have happened if the Victorians had "solved death"... so if they succeed they'd simply be creating the same problem for later generations that wealthy eternal Victorians would cause for people born today.

Evolution requires death...

[shpalman]

Evolution requires death...

You first.

[TopBadger]

Evolution requires death...

You first.

Given Bezos and Musk are both significantly older than me... no thanks. If I'm lucky I'll die a little slower than the average rate... and be here for another 50 odd years.

[Sciolus]

They used to say that two things are certain: death and taxes. The super-rich have long since disproved half of that, and are now working on the other half.

[dyqik]

I always hoped cryogenics would take off. Get the rich to freeze themselves until we had a cure for death, and then accidentally forget to unfreeze them.

Cryogenics is doing fantastically well. 35 mK is now available as an off the shelf commodity base temperature.

I think you might mean cryonics though.

[dyqik]

Evolution requires death...

Only evolution by natural selection (and technically it only requires differential rates of reproduction, although death before reaching your reproductive potential is a common way for that to occur)

But we have brains that can forecast and plan. We can evolve society and even ourselves without needing the natural selection by differential rates of reproduction. Even improving farm species doesn't need death anymore.