What exotic science fiction technology would you finance research into, if you had billions of dollars?

That has a real chance of existing? Something with clean power.

That I really want? Replicators. Man think about a life not having to cook or clean dishes.

Earth unity. Whatever they did to make humans stop attacking each other was crazy.

We probably need another species to compete against to unite us. I'd put Billions into nasa to find aliens so we can fight them.

I'd like to support solarpunk development. I just want to live a simple life, with high tech in cooperation with the environment. We need it badly. I would fund so many community libraries. Don't misunderstand me though. I still want space travel, but I no longer trust capitalists with it.

An end to the problem of aging, and death. Whether that means turning into cyborgs, I don’t care. I just want to choose when I die. Not having dying slowly happen to me like a terminal illness. Plus life is way too short. If I get tired of immortality let me off myself. But let me at least get tired of it first.

Asteroid mining. This may still be too far off and too expensive. But the first person to get this working successfully will be a trillionare.

This plus fusion are the two things most needed to transition humanity to a space based civilization.

Two chicks at the same time.

Bacta Tanks. Maybe a few days in one would fix my back.

How about a UBI? Do social policies count as technologies? They do in 4X games, so I'm going with it.

Doors that go "swish" when they open.

I would fund a truly fair AI and a very gentle, but firm, self replicating robot army to enforce it's benevolent will on everyone.

So basically SkyNet, after I make a pointer arithmetic mistake.

The fiction part would kind of keep me from doing that. And I fully believe that everything that actually is possible is already being worked on as quickly as possible.

So, maybe just pay for a whole lot of renewable energy plants all around the globe. Buy up all fossil fuel plants, demolish them and put in renewables instead.

Or fund a fully open smartphone with modular components like a PC with good specs and an optional keyboard.

Every single suggestion so far has been positive, life-affirming, and productive, so I'm going to be Gru here for a change:

Bolos. AI tanks with no crew and heavily (Greek) Spartan-centric model training.

Regrowing teeth

Current against foetal alkohol syndrome

Faster-than-light travel. Which is physically impossible, but whatever.

Open source non destructive Brain machine interfaces

I want to interact with machines at the speed of thought so bad. Not to mention what it could mean for people when they are disabled.

Consciousness storage and transfer

Nanotech robots for garbage recycling.

Imagine if we dumped our trash into one end of a big fuckoff machine and out the other end it came out in microscopic pieces into hoppers for reuse or correct disposal.

Throw in an old appliance and out the other end comes the aluminium from the body, the steel, the copper from the wiring, the silica... you get the idea.

I don't know how plausible this is, but a way for trans men and trans women to exchange sexual traits. There might be an answer elsewhere in that there are animals that can change sex in certain conditions so there is some biological evidence of possibility in a singular case. However it seems anti-poetic that we have genetic females who want to be genetic males and genetic males who want to be genetic females and the answer that we currently have as society is for them to go fuck themselves.

I guess for more realistic, then deep dive VR.

Van Neumann probes

Those machines that can make food instantly for sure. Put a few of those bad boys in the right place and we've solved world hunger. Also, healthy tasty food for those of us who can't cook and can't afford to eat at restaurants.

Granted, people in the restaurant would largely lose their job, but we can retrain them for something else like we did with stagecoach drivers, telephone operators and honest politicians before them 🤷

Antigravity, Durasteel, shields, cold fusion, nanotech, time travel, warp, dimension sliding/hopping, mind mapping, cryo sleep, teleportation, Positronic brain, ...

May be poulsen treatment or immortality cruciform from Hyperion. Not sure if immortality is such a good idea though. Throughout history horrible dictatorships tend to end after the death of the despots. Imagine if these horrible people are immortal...

Space based mirrors for asteroid mining. Bounce a sh*tton of light from the sun around and just melt asteroids. Love that in the Troy Rising series.

Lots of problems getting there irl (need a better way to get out of the gravity well, and light speed lag for command and control would be a real issue) but the idea is just too fun.

Do I have to choose one? The world food program is never overfunded, and that would buy a stupid amount of lobbying for whatever overlooked domestic issue, or even just research grants for neglected but foundational things. Boring/ugly animals could also use conservation.

room temp superconductors.

Catgirls

and space adapted humans

• radiation resistance (I think charnobyl wolves have that already)
• better eyeballs, digestive system and bones
• propulsion system
• vacum survivability

Also clean energy but personally virtual reality 100%. Give me that SAO experience, damn it. Just without y'know the bad stuff

Edit: mandatory Link

I’m convinced that, despite his denial, Isaac Asimov’s psychohistory was a Red Scare-dodging caricature of historical materialism / scientific socialism. I’d put my money there.

Fusion, nuclear propulsion, nanotechnology, genetic engineering, biomining, biological fuel cells

Giving it all away to mutual aid groups to have them figure out local issues.

Hoverboards obviously.

Not so much technology, but I'd fund the Howard Society for real. For those unfamiliar, it's a program to identify people who are genetically predisposed to natural long life and pay them to have kids with each other; it's a core plot point in a bunch of Heinlein novels.

Combustible lemons. But failing that, a portal gun.

Perhaps the main use for technology is increasing the amount of inequality society can tolerate without collapse. I can't fix inequality -- that just seems to be what the humans want.

However by investing in surveillance technology, computer vision, and AI I could perhaps help our society to bear unbounded amounts of inequality indefinitely, without collapse. Social collapse is a less-than-zero-sum game, whereas an unequal society is still generally more-than-zero-sum. So I posit that the latter is objectively better.

Especially if you plan to survive long enough to get off this stinking rock -- you're going to need to concentrate resources, because the public sector only seems to be able to succeed at space travel under a very specific set of hard-to-replicate circumstances. Whereas greed, inflated egos, and concentrated power are easy to replicate.

Your objections will be noted.

genetically engineered housing

Arcologies or greenhouse super domes for food production of any kind wherever it's desired

Or carbon nanotube mass production so we can build mile-high connected super structures

• Space tether.
• Nuclear fusion.
• Home assistant robots

It's not really science fiction since there are scientists working on it right now, because capitalism is the brake of development. I would invest on photonic computer research, that would help advancement of society in all aspect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_computing

Being able to photosynthesize. It wouldn't be that hard either, we already can, just not to make food.

A better battery would be nice.

Replicator. But that kinda seems impossible so that Black and Decker rehydrator thingy from Back to the Future II.

I would stay in relatively achievable things like a sugar fuel cell or microbial food production. Things we don't quite have yet but not do to the knowledge not being there.

Matter transporters for work and holodecks for play.