[irremediable]

I don't really think this is true. There are lots of famous super-wealthy people who've funded sciences (e.g. Nuffield, Wolfson, Rockefeller -- those are just three charities I work with). There are lots of famous super-wealthy people who've funded the arts, in particular things like avant-garde and classical pieces.

You held off giving an example, but could you give me one -- one that's qualitatively different to the stuff that wealthy people do often fund?

[Retric]

If Bill gates acting on is focused on building ~3 ITER style fusion reactors starting in say 2000 and without the overhead of multi-national organizations or all that PHD research he could have a reasonable chance of building a working fusion reactor 30 years before we are likely to.

Granted, Bill has done the world a lot of good, but I suspect that's the kind of project shutupalready was referring to.

Or for a higher risk example a few billion might get you a multi stage scram jet for getting stuff into LEO which could be huge. Or for an organization idea, build an ion drive tugboat for moving satellites around in orbit. Then if it works you take the revenue from that and start building ever more space based infrastructure with the long term goal of getting some people living on other stars.

PS: If you accept huge projects might just flat out fail there are plenty of possibilities. Human level AI?

[shutupalready]

> but I suspect that's the kind of project shutupalready was referring to

Yes, those are precisely the kinds of projects I was thinking of. (I was worried that if I gave examples, the conversation would derail into the viability of fusions reactors, ion drives, human level AI, or whatever.)