How would you spend $50 billion?

Yeah, like i give a rat's ass whether or not you're bored. The point is to do the most good. Why don't you join your buddy Sich und Drang and find some hookers and some coke. Neither one of you will be around for very long to plague the rest of us.

Straw man . . . i didn't say anything of the kind. What makes you think you're the center of everyone else's universe, and that all they can think about is what you write?

As it happens, i don't think yours is a good idea, though. You can piss fifty billion dollars away on a space program in less than a year, and you won't get anywhere near the asteroid belt, let alone intergalactic space. (Your use of that term was ill-conceived.)

If you really wanted to make a difference in space exploration, you would set up a conservative investment fund which spent X amount on feasibility studies and planning, and which re-invested the remaining, after-costs balance. That way, the fund would eventually grow to the point at which it could, in conjunction with governmental funds and private capital make a realistic contribution to your goal. And it would still be operating long after you're dead.

Your concept is a pipe dream. Fifty billion is not enough to accomplish anything concrete, and when it was spent, you'd be still standing around with your dick in your hand, and nothing in your pocket.

As for thinking about the future, that's just more personal conceit on your part. Apparently, you aren't swift enough to see that providing children with a good education is just about the best way to provide for the future. I'd say, you aren't really thinking about the future at all.

For $50 billion? You really aren't thinking about much. That amount of money would quickly be pissed away in an industry which can't provide full-time employment for those who are already employed there.

You might save a handful of jobs, but i doubt that there'd be much job creation at all. Most of your money would end up in the pockets of existing corporations, which means you'd be making sure that the rich got richer while you got poorer.

Even if there were significant job creation (a doubtful proposition at best), you'd piss away $50 billion dollars so fast in the space industry that it would have no real effect on the future.

No, with $50 billion dollars, you'd be just another sucker with too much cash and too little sense. They'd spot you coming a mile away. The entire space program which culminated in putting people on the moon in 1969 cost on the order of $70 billion dollars, so you wouldn't even have that much to start with. Furthermore, those were 1950s and 1960s dollars--in today's terms, that's half a trillion dollars or more. You don't even have start-up capital to set up mining programs in space. If, however, you intelligently invested $50 billion, you could someday have earned enough money to get the project started.

Being "frugal" is meaningless. If you want the European Space Agency, or the Russians or the Japanese or the Chinese or NASA to boost anything into space, you're going to have to pay the going rate--they're not going to dicker with you about it. And if you don't get anything boosted into space, you're not going anywhere.

And if you want to build something lasting, you invest.

Your attempts to make yourself look like a profound thinker are tedious. You have a nice day . . . don't bother to write.