THere is a book just out, I believe called _Longitude_ about the
Englishman who solved the problem of longitudinal navigation.
Apparently, the Parliament put up a big prize to the person who could
solve the problem. He solved it by developing highly accurate clocks and
a system of astronomical and velocity based tables. THis is probably the
most famous and commercially beneficial application of the invention
bounty, though there are currently prizes up for many different
engineering acheivements, and if you remember, Paul MacCready developed
his human powered airplanes in the 80's to win such prizes put up by
private organizations, doing a mile loop, then spanning the English
Channel, and then the course from Crete to Greece that was mythically
taken by Deadalus.
If you note the progression MacCready took, winning each prize along the
way, this might be a good blueprint to go by, having cash prizes to
individuals or teams that extend human life past 120, 150, 200, and 500
years. Given that the sums will be waiting for that amount of time to
mature, they will be earning a goodly amount of interest while they wait
for those spans to complete.
As for cryonics, which realistically is by definition NOT life
extension, but suspension, as a corpsicle is not aware, cognizant etc
while under suspension, I would suggest prizes for successfull revival
of various higher mammals as intermediary steps, with human revival as
only the final one. Of course, there will also need to be prizes for
anciallary technologies like nano that will be required for reparation
of corpsicles to full capability.
-- TANSTAAFL!!! Michael Lorrey ------------------------------------------------------------ mailto:retroman@tpk.net Inventor of the Lorrey Drive Agent Lorrey@ThePentagon.com Silo_1013@ThePentagon.com http://www.tpk.net/~retroman/Mikey's Animatronic Factory My Own Nuclear Espionage Agency (MONEA) MIKEYMAS(tm): The New Internet Holiday Transhumans of New Hampshire (>HNH) ------------------------------------------------------------ #!/usr/local/bin/perl-0777---export-a-crypto-system-sig-RC4-3-lines-PERL @k=unpack('C*',pack('H*',shift));for(@t=@s=0..255){$y=($k[$_%@k]+$s[$x=$_ ]+$y)%256;&S}$x=$y=0;for(unpack('C*',<>)){$x++;$y=($s[$x%=256]+$y)%256; &S;print pack(C,$_^=$s[($s[$x]+$s[$y])%256])}sub S{@s[$x,$y]=@s[$y,$x]}