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Comment by gersh | Hacker News Reader

What if Larry Page decides he wants the future is to colonize the moon. Then, he decides to invests all or a large portions of Google's money in colonizing the moon. Will anyone stop him? Would this count as a startup again?

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Count me as one of the guys miffed at everybody calling every little hacked out Rails website as a "startup". But in the case of a moon colony, I'm willing to let it slide.

"Don't be discouraged if what you produce initially is something other people dismiss as a toy. In fact, that's a good sign. That's probably why everyone else has been overlooking the idea. The first microcomputers were dismissed as toys. And the first planes, and the first cars. At this point, when someone comes to us with something that users like but that we could envision forum trolls dismissing as a toy, it makes us especially likely to invest."

http://www.paulgraham.com/organic.html

Sounds like the Oracle sailing team.

Except going to the moon is awesome and not at all retarded.

Still effectively zero ROI though. Been there, done that, and all we got to show for it was a couple rocks and a money pit space station. Personally I'd vote for Larry using his billions to refund the Superconducting Supercollider. Now that would be one hell of a startup.

Not that it wouldn't be great to see it started up again, but how is the supercollider any less of a money pit than the ISS? I can hardly see it being a profitable business plan for a startup...

Look all that stuff is useless we need him to invest in ITER such that we can have fusion reactors soon.

I was just joking about SSI as a startup, but I'd wager that unlocking the secrets of the fundamental particles of the universe has a great deal more potential than even ISS's best experiments.

One of our biggest problems re space exploration and colonizing other planets is that our energy and propulsion systems suck for the task. Imho, materials science, nanotech, and further drilling down into sub-atomic mechanics is where we're more likely to make breakthroughs in things like energy generation, storage, and efficient propulsion.

The moon's got plenty of unused space just waiting for AdSense.

Colonizing != visiting. There're many possible economic benefits of colonizing the moon - new sources for rare minerals, reduced population pressure on earth, and a launch pad for future interplanetary missions are some of the major ones.

And getting all those minerals back to Earth, and building sustainable communities on the moon, costs as much or more than the value derived, hence zero ROI. And we're not going anywhere in space till we have more efficient propulsion than we have now. Isn't the energy/propulsion problem the one we should be focusing on first?

Why would you bring those minerals back to earth? You mine minerals on the moon so you can manufacture things on the moon, so that you can build the machinery necessary to visit other stars outside of earth's gravity well, so that you can reduce the energy needed to launch an interplanetary expedition, so that you can solve your energy/propulsion problems.

Oracle doesn't have a sailing team. Larry does, paid out of his own pocket. He just sticks the Oracle logo on his boat because it's his boat and he can stick whatever logo he wants on it.

Instead of going to the moon, he should consider mining an asteroid. Apparently, a 100m Fe-rich near-Earth asteroid contains ~$150 billion worth of platinum. There's at least a potential of ROI.

Larry is apparently a major advocate of Google's self-driving cars. Done properly, that's worth trillions.

"To put that another way, if Google managed to scoop up just 2% of that industry they’d have more than doubled their revenue. With their driverless car project, I think they’ve got a shot of taking a much bigger slice of the pie than that." I'd say it takes more to "do it properly", but I'd recommend reading this nonetheless: http://mattmaroon.com/2011/01/03/google-will-become-an-ai-co...

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not. Just to put things in context, the GDP of France is 2 Trillion.

I'm completely serious. The economic benefits of automated cars are staggering. And I mean trillions in net present value, not trillions in profits per year.

Self-driving cars would count as very "startup" like in my book, especially if they make it a developer platform.

~$150 billion at its current scarcity-based valuation, you mean.

Very good point. When the Spanish raided the Americas and took all the gold home, all they succeeded in achieving was massive inflation. History has an important lessons here.

Yes, you wouldn't flood the market, of course. Likely you could only bring it back piece by piece anyway, so it might not be a huge problem.

http://www.google.com/virgle/pioneer.html

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