David Brin <brin@cts.com> wrote on Wed Mar 22 09:48:06 2000 in <v04210117b4fdac8772ef@[204.216.199.235]> :
>ABSTRACT: What daring 21st century concepts or projects would you most
>like to see pursued, if money were no object?
> [ ... the idea of funding very large scale projects through private
>philanthropy .. ]
>EXAMPLES: might include the immense energy tower that some Texas and
>Israeli researchers proposed for desert regions, drawing both moisture
>and
>wind power from high-level air flows... or how about funding the solar
>sail tests that NASA (for some reason) has delayed for thirty years,
>potentially letting even high schools send cameras to Mars?
>Or consider the following; With the $25 Billion that Sam Walton left
>to
>just five people, he could instead have funded a manned mission to
>Mars!
>In exchange, how could the International Astronautical Union refuse to
>rename the moon Deimos "Walton"? Old Sam missed that bet, but some
>other multi billionaire may not.
I think there are two classes of problem here. One calls for a vast amount
of money to pay for a research or exploration effort, with short-to-middle
term timescales and concrete goals, and sometimes the potential for
future profit. The Mars mission looks to be in this category. Take
Zubrin's "Case for Mars", and fund it. The problem with this remains
finding the funding sources. Fortunes like Sam Walton's are tied up
in Wal-Mart stock; that $25G couldn't be realized in cash in the short
term. This is even more true for dot-com wealth - any large scale,
short-term effort to cash out will crash any of those stocks. I can
see these fortunes being applied as seed capital for business ventures
with a long-term outlook (sort of like patient, family wealth), but
money on a mission-to-Mars scale just might not be there in the short run,
even given the Gates' of the world.
The second class of problem - the "Henchman's Fund" and that sort of thing,
are long-term solutions waiting for problems. These fit the foundation
model more closely and can be financed through money thrown off by long-
term management of a large portfolio. It'd take a bit more active
management to get cash out of a dot-com paper-rich portfolio, but it's
possible.
Now, of course, the fun part..
Several people have written back with the notion that the 3rd World is
full of potential. I agree - lots and lots of potential, most of the world's
population, resources, fascinating cultures, and (often) no lack of drive
on the part of the people. Anyone who's travelled in the "developing" world
has seen this: marketplaces and traffic and microbusinesses everywhere.
Huge potential - and yet rarely does anything of consequence. Why?
There's no single answer - resources, education, lots of things have been
mentioned. However, there's one thing that's a constant in
"underdeveloped" countries: terrible, terrible, short-sighted, kleptocratic,
nepotistic, dictatorial >government<. The education that's supposed to
come from giving whizzy slate computers to the people, or the rise in
property values that might otherwise come from buying up seemingly valuable
rights-of-way in places like Lagos, can't happen if the leaders of the
countries won't allow you to do it - or worse, will be happy to see the
investment, and then will confiscate it - either overtly, or over time
through punitive taxation, extortion, and all the usual 3rd World means.
So - how about the Revolution Foundation? A well-funded group develops
both a business plan - and an invasion plan - for a target country. The
ineffective leadership is forced out in one way or another. The group
comes in with sufficient resources (mostly trained staff, this isn't to
be another throw-money-away venture) to build up needed institutions -
courts, schools, etc. Our favorite sort of minimal-interference,
market-respecting government is instituted. It doesn't have to be
democratic, day one likely it can't be. >Now< buy the land. Sit
back and wait.
How much could it cost to take over, say, Zaire/Congo, anyway?
(I'm only about half joking [and much less than half-baked], but it
seems that so few so-called solutions for the problems of 3rd World
countries take the corrosive realities of many local political systems
into account.)
/rs
-- Rob Sweeney: Information Ecology. rjs@rsie.com, http://www.rsie.com/ Time is a warning.
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