Another top 5 shortlist. Many are coming up with vague versions of rewilding, but the wilderness corridors detail really levels up this variant. Internet of national parks!
There are many architecture ideas but most are boringly trad or arbitrarily zany. I like this one for the sheer misanthropy of it. Also I actually like brutalism. Big concrete blocks. What’s not to like.
Honorable mention in the media category, which has no winners yet. I like the structural novelty of it, but it lacks the specifics that would distinguish it from investment in a category of ideas rather than a specific idea.
The best idea so far in the pragmatic category. This is the sort of clumsy seeming banal idea that can transform into a miracle if someone throws enough money and focused attention at it.
Another good one in the general misanthropy category, elevated by the Culture like combination of starship, robot, and paperclip maximizer. Any of the 3 alone would be a category, but the intersection is an idea
If this launch goes well, best Christmas present ever… the photos should be unprecedented, since it’s an infrared telescope. Huge gas cloud panoramas and stuff. It will be bigger as when T-Rex got feathers… I think out view of a mostly “empty” sky will change…
I remember being super excited and then super disappointed by early Hubble years when the mirror defect came to light (heh!). There were lot of angry op-eds about $5b white elephant, bad big government mismanagement, etc…. and then they fixed it. The greatest comeback ever.
I admit I was small-minded enough back then to briefly join in the cynical nasa-bashing. Taught me an important lesson of some sort.
But damn, the deep field image alone is worth the whole Hubble mission
When people are bad at spending money it accumulates with people who are good at collecting it. Most people are very bad at spending money beyond the relatively low limit of personal hedonism. By about $4m, most people are out of ideas.
Almost everybody confuses categories of spending for spending ideas. Categories of spending ideas are nearly worthless. All creativity in spending lies in the specificity.
Imo average spending ideas are commodity instances of categories. “Artist collective” is a category of idea. “Artist collective in Austin” is an actual idea.
Good spending ideas are specific and “pop” from parent category.
You have a billion dollars. You are not allowed to spend it in any way that directly helps others like charity, gifts, scholarships/grants, or pure investments like in startups or stocks. You’ve also already exhausted all hedonistic desires of your own.
How do you use it?
I like both art and research but the dominance of those categories makes me super suspicious and a bit hostile to both.
Unless it’s a specific work of art or research you’ve conceptualized to the point that it’s more an execution contract/commision than an ab initio creative project, it’s not in the spirit of the prompt.