r/hypotheticalsituation • u/Isekai_litrpg • 7d ago

You have $1 Trillion USD, what is your legacy project?

Pretty much you've got too much money to have to worry about anything, what is the big thing you do with the excess money and your life.

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u/JustLookingForMayhem 7d ago

Space elevator. Technically, we probably have the technology to make one today, but the expenses would be ludicrous initially. A trillion is not enough to build one, but it might be enough to get one started. If a space elevator was built, material scarcity would be a thing of the past because there are so many resources in space. The problem is just getting them.

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u/actuarial_cat 7d ago

Nah, we don’t have the tech to do it yet. We don’t have a material that can support its weight for that distance.

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u/JustLookingForMayhem 7d ago

We don't have the tech to build it up for that distance. What we probably have (as in the math supports it, but no testing has been done) is carbon nano tubes with high tensile strength. In theory, if the elevator is dropped from space to a base instead of being built up from the ground, it can be done. The problems would be getting it to space, assembling it in space, dropping it through the atmosphere without dropping the whole thing, and hitting a prepared base from space. Once it is built, the earth's rotation solves a lot of problems. It would be an absolute logistical nightmare even before the political realities get involved, but cheap access to space would solve pretty much every resource scarcity problem.