[ExI] extropy-chat Digest, Vol 55, Issue 2

[Stefano Vaj]

On Tue, Apr 1, 2008 at 9:45 PM, PJ Manney <pjmanney at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 1, 2008 at 11:47 AM, Tom Nowell <nebathenemi at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>  > Meanwhile...$500 billion on...everyone's got a pet
>  > project that they think would help the world, advance
>  > human civilisation, do something amazing - and many of
>  > them have far, far smaller pricetags. Sometimes you've
>  > got to wonder at the waste of it all.
>
>  Actually, according to Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E.
>  Stiglitz and Harvard professor Linda J. Bilmes, that number is $3
>  Trillion so far -- and that's supposedly an "excessively conservative"
>  estimate.  And it's rising.

Why, I have just happened to mention the trivial 10bn price tag of
ITER. And it took a decade and a consortium of ten different
countries... :-(((

What could we have achieved with 500bn, let alone 3000bn, in the field
of nuclear fusion?

Stefano Vaj