Human brain transforms money into innovation

September 13, 1:38 PMSF Boomers ExaminerSuzanna Stinnett

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Brainstorming about how to motivate people to engage in online communication is one of my regular activities. I come up with lots of ideas about motivation. One of them is the Glossary series. Peter Diamandis, however, has probably got the biggest motivator for engaging innovative minds.

Diamandis spoke last night at the Long Now Foundation’s SALT Talk series. His X-Prize Foundation offers big money as incentive to innovate toward specific goals.

At the end of the evening, Diamandis offered the audience these potential “Mega-X-Prize” goals. Long Now Foundation’s Stewart Brand asked what we thought might be added to the list if the time frame is stretched out over, say, a century, rather than a couple of decades. 10-20 years is the intended time frame for most of these goals.

I think just reading the list is a bit of a brain exercise. What do you think?
   

1. First (private) Human on Mars
2. Faster-than-light Communications
3. Organ Replacement
4. First Baby Born off Earth
5. Babelfish - Instant universal translator .
6. Flying cars
7. Artificial Intelligence: Build a machine that passes the Turing Test
8. Self-replicating (non-biological) machines:
9. Longevity:  Double the length of the healthy human lifespan
10. Cancer:  Be able to detect any cancer at the 100-cell stage and Zap-it
11. Predict Earth Quakes with >1 hour / >1 day notice
12. Cure for AIDS
13. Identify extra-solar life-bearing planet:  Any type of replicating life from, single cell or greater
14. SETI - Proof of extra-terrestrial intelligence
15. NY to Paris in 30 min
16. Private, fully-reusable, Orbital Spaceship
17. Human to orbit for <$100,000
18. Apollo 8: Privately fly 1 person around the moon and safely back to Earth.
19. Robot Sports:  (1) beat Tiger; (2) beat a championship soccer team; (3) beat a Formula-1 team
20. Humans in Deep Ocean:  3 people to ocean bottom twice in 3 days.
21. Image 100% of the Ocean Floor
22. Backup the Biosphere:  Create a data backup of the internet and the top 10,000 species on Earth
23. Replicator:  create out of energy and raw materials anything.
24. Energy Extraction - e.g. ZeroPoint ; Cold Fusion
25. Hot Fusion -- Sustained, net-energy positive
26. Vision Restoration: Wire up a false eye for a blind person to gain 20:20 vision
27. First brain transplant: full functioning of memory and motorfunction and lives > 1 day
28. Download brain to a computer with all memory intact
29. Brain to brain communication that are more than 10x the speed of audio conversations
30. Develop real-time collective consciousness for a group of over 100 people
31. Eradicate Hunger for > 90% of the human population
32. Eradicate poverty for > 90% of the human population
33. Carbon Sequestration: Create an economic device to extract/sequester carbon from the atmosphere
34. Create an AI that can engage and educate children to their highest potential
35. Develop a teaching system that allows an increase learning rates by an order of magnitude.

If you come up with a great idea you think is worth one of the X-Prizes, better hustle over to Diamandis' site, and let them know.

Suzanna