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Fall 2008

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32 #1 Fall 2008 Miscellany Science Fiction Gets Funding Sonia Arrison Billionaires who care about escape velocity, radical life extension, or the Turing Test don't come along very often, but when they do, their actions have the potential to dramatically change the world. Space travel, biotechnology, and artificial intelligence are three areas where some super-smart, super- wealthy people are directing their money – and it's starting to pay off. For instance, Richard Branson of Virgin Group has already signed up 200 people to take his commercial space flights starting in 2009. And, as if that wasn't enough, he also announced that he'll be performing the first-ever space marriage on board one of his ships. When the new couple consid- ers a location for their honeymoon, hotel chain billionaire Bob Bigelow can help. His company, Bigelow Aerospace, is planning on launching experimental inflatable hotel modules sometime in 2010. But it doesn't end there. Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin take things a step further with the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize for any team of scientists who land a robot on the surface of the moon, travel 500 meters over the lunar surface, and send images and data back to the earth. When it comes to biotechnology, Mi- crosoft co-founder Paul Allen's Institute for Brain Science has already mapped an entire mouse brain, detailing more than 21,000 genes at the cellular level. Now his researchers are focused on the human brain, and perhaps soon they can start thinking about reverse engineering it. en there's Peter iel, the PayPal co- founder turned hedge fund manager who is looking to speed up research in all three areas (space, life extension, and AI). On the non-profit side, iel has given to the Sin- gularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence as well as the Methuselah Foundation that seeks to cure aging. On the for-profit side, he's working to create a unique kind of in- vestment strategy with his associates at the Founder's Fund. "I'm trying to construct a science fic- tion fund," iel says, "but I'm nervous to describe it as that because it might attract crazy people and not real entrepreneurs." It's true that wherever there are new ideas, there are a few crazies, which may explain why Larry Ellison seems to go out of his way to downplay the "anti-aging" tone of his $42 million per year bioscience donations. Yet Ellison's foundation was responsible for funding David Sinclair of Sirtris Pharmaceuticals, which is develop- ing a drug based on resveratrol, a chemical found in the skin of red grapes that fights the effects of aging. Sinclair's company was recently sold to GlaxoSmithKline for $720 million, proving that Ellison's anti-aging bet is not only edgy, but also valued by the marketplace. Of course, some billionaires funding cool technology prefer to avoid the lime- light and questions of money. For instance, Amazon's Jeff Bezos refuses to say how much he is spending on his space project Blue Origin. It was also difficult to find de- tails concerning the investments of Apollo Group's John Sperling and investor Jeffrey Epstein. Nevertheless, all these billionaires are funding edgy and important work, and one hopes their ranks will grow. Sonia Arrison is a senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute and is currently working on a new book examining the social and political impacts of extreme longevity. Paul Allen's Institute for Brain Science has… mapped an entire mouse brain, detailing more than 21,000 genes at the cellular level… Name Net worth Paul Allen 16 billion Jeff Bezos 8.2 billion Robert Bigelow Reportedly around 1 billion (he won't comment) Richard Branson 4.4 billion Larry Ellison 25 billion Jeffrey Epstein Unclear Larry Page, Sergey Brin 18.6, 18.7 billion John Sperling 1.7 billion Peter Thiel 1.2 billion

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