Billionaires and their far out ideas

1. Billionaires and their far-out ideas
Whether it's the search for aliens or
immortality, the world's super rich are
putting their money in odd places

2. Contd..
• In his novel `The City and the Stars', Arthur C Clarke imagined a
future city where people are immortal because their minds are
copied to a central computer and downloaded again and again in
new bodies. Pure science fiction? Yes, but wait. Russian billionaire
and media mogul Dmitry Itskov has brought together 30 top
Russian scientists in his 2045 Initiative to research “cybernetic
immortality and the artificial body“ so that human consciousness
can be transferred to an avatar or a synthetic brain. Istkov plans to
live for 10,000 years.Like him, a growing band of billionaires, many
from Silicon Valley , are funding massive research projects on
themes that are decidedly sci-fi. Yuri Milner, another Russian
billionaire recently teamed up with Stephen Hawking and other
scientists to announce a $100 million grant to look for extra-
terrestrial life.

3. THE ASTRO-PRENEURS
• Another favorite area of billionaire investment is space exploration.
Sergey Brin and Larry Page, founders of Google, along with their
company's executive chairman Eric Schmidt announced in 2012 that
they were setting up a company called Planetary Resources which
will develop flying robots that will go to other planets or moons or
asteroids, dig up precious minerals and get them back. James
Cameron of Avatar fame is also supporting them.
• Not to be left behind is Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder, who has set up
Blue Origin, a company for enabling “human access to space at
dramatically lower cost and increased reliability“. Currently, they are
working on a vertical take-off vertical landing (VTVL) spacecraft.
• Elon Musk, co-founder of PayPal and CEO of Tesla Motors, is
concentrating on SpaceX, a company specializing in space flights.
But he has larger ambitions -to establish colonies on other planets
like Mars.

4. Contd..
• “When I first met Elon Musk in March 2002 he told me
that he planned to retire on Mars. I thought he was
either crazy or had too much to drink. But as I got to
know him, I realized that he was dead serious. He
believed this was possible and was something he really
wanted to do,“ Vivek Wadhwa, professor at Stanford
and Duke and distinguished fellow at Singularity
University told TOI.
• “I know several other billionaires who are doing such
amazing things. The common thread is that they think
big and want to make an impact on humanity. They
don't know the bounds of what is possible and want to
make dreams come true,“ Wadhwa said.

5. Contd..
• Are these super successful businessmen motivated by altruism or
making more money? Perhaps it is a little bit of both, thinks
Wadhwa. He cites the example of Peter Diamandis, founder of X
Prize and Space Adventures and co-founder of Planetary Resources,
who wants to mine asteroids for precious metals. “Peter sees the
ability to benefit mankind as well as major financial opportunity for
his team. He has been talking about this for years -about going to
the heavens. This provides a means for getting there -it is a
platform from which he can launch bigger projects.“
• “Investment in commercial space flight has become one of the big
trends among the super-rich,“ Liam Bailey, head of global research
at Knight Frank, told Financial Times. The global property
consultancy says that there are more than 70 ultra-high net worth
individuals (with at least $30m in net assets) investing in
commercial space travel.Among these are 13 billionaires with a
combined wealth of $175bn.

6. Contd..
• Such is the attraction to space flight, and its commercial
implications, that downstream activity is also getting atten tion.
Robert Bigelow, the real estate developer and hotel magnate has
spent $275 million of his own fortune researching, building, and
testing expandable living areas for outer space. NASA is paying him
almost $18 million for one of his inflatable habitats to go to the
International Space Station in September this year.
• FUNDING IMMORTALITY
• Immortality is another investment many tech titans are betting on.
Oracle found er Lawrence Ellison funded research to use computing
power to resolve genetic issues leading to longevity through his
Ellison Medical Foundation. Google's Sergey Brin set up Calico, a
secretive company with a huge endowment, to research life
extension. Peter Thiel, billionaire co-founder of PayPal and now a
hedge fund manager, is funding researchers through his nonprofit,
Breakout Labs, to fight aging.

7. MONEY ON MACHINES
• The search for longevity has a strong overlap with another sci-fi like
area fast approaching reality -Artificial Intelligence (AI). A Financial
Times article described the AI stampede as “one of the hottest
trends in start-up investing since the big data slogan launched a
thousand entrepreneurial dreams. This is not surprising considering
that many of the young billionaires interested in it had made their
fortunes handling chips and algorithms and big data as they created
the information technology revolution. Paul Allen, Microsoft co-
founder, set up a brain science institute, as did Fred Kavli, real
estate baron.
• Google has hired futurist Ray Kurzweil as its chief engineer in the
search for thinking machines and ultimately, as Kurzweil predicts, to
merge such machines with human bodies. Thiel too has invested in
an AI startup. “I believe that evolution is a true account of nature,“
Thiel told CNBC in an interview. “But I think we should try to escape
it or transcend it in our society .“

8. Contd..
• An ironic counterpoint to this frenetic activity
in frontier science is that Bill Gates, the
biggest donor-funder of them all, seems to be
critical of it. In a Reddit Q&A in January, he
posted: “It seems pretty egocentric while we
still have malaria and TB for rich people to
fund things so they can live longer. It would be
nice to live longer though I admit.“

9. Parveen Kumar Chadha… THINK TANK
(Founder and C.E.O of Saxbee Consultants & Other-Mother
marketingandcommunicationconsultants.com)
Email :-saxbeeconsultants@gmail.com
Mobile No. +91-9818308353
Address:-First Floor G-20(A), Kirti Nagar, New Delhi India Postal Code-110015