Rowan Hooper - How to Spend a Trillion Dollars: Saving the World and Solving the Biggest Mysteries in Science

HOW TO SPEND A TRILLION DOLLARS

Saving the world and solving the biggest mysteries in science

Saving the world and solving the biggest mysteries in science

ROWAN HOOPER

First published in Great Britain in 2021 by

Profile Books

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London WC1X 9HD

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Copyright Rowan Hooper 2021

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1788163453

e-ISBN 978-1782836100

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. on Forest Stewardship Council (mixed sources) certified paper.

For my mum, Mary

YOU KNOW THAT DAYDREAM where you suddenly come into a vast fortune? You could buy a castle or a tropical island hideaway, help out all your friends, do a bit of good in the world. But what if it was a truly incredible sum? What if you had a trillion dollars to spend, and a year to do it? And what if the rules of the game were that you had to do it for the world make some real difference to peoples lives, or to the health of the planet, or to the advancement of science.

A trillion dollars thats one thousand billion dollars is at once an absurdly huge amount of money, and not that much in the scheme of things. It is, give or take, 1 per cent of world GDP. Its what the United States spends every year and a half on the military, or in less time if theres a big war on. It is an amount that can be quite easily rustled up through the smoke and mirrors of quantitative easing, which officially is the mass purchase of government bonds but which looks suspiciously like the spontaneous creation of money. After the 2008 financial crash, more than $4.5 trillion was quantitatively eased in the US alone. All the other major economies made their own money in this ghostly way.

And it is not just governments that have this kind of money. Two of the worlds biggest companies, Microsoft and Amazon, are each worth over $1 trillion; Apple Computer stock is valued at $2 trillion. Amazon boss Jeff Bezos has a personal fortune of around $190 billion, and could become a trillionaire the worlds first by 2026, while the worlds richest 1 per cent together own a staggering $162 trillion. Thats 45 per cent of all global wealth.

There is so much money out there, sloshing around. At the start of 2020, private equity firms held $1.45 trillion in what they call dry powder, and what the rest of us call cash: piles of money sitting around awaiting investment. Just imagine what you could do with it. Just a little bit of it, just a measly trillion dollars. You could send probes across the solar system. You could eradicate malaria hell, you could cure all diseases. You could start a settlement on the Moon. You could launch an interstellar mission to another star. You could build a massive particle collider to explore the nature of reality like never before. You could solve global poverty. You could build new kinds of quantum computers and try to develop artificial consciousness. You could work to increase human lifespan. Then again, maybe you could try to transition the world to renewable energy. You could buy and preserve the rainforests. You could try to save all endangered species. You could refreeze the melting Arctic. You could reduce the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere. You could launch a new, sustainable agricultural revolution. You could even create a new life form.

If it sounds like Im getting carried away, let me just say that all these ideas are projects which scientists are thinking about and even working on, but which are hampered by lack of resources. The world is full of extraordinary opportunities, and the vast majority are never undertaken. Those challenges that are tackled mostly either fail or only inch forward imperceptibly and infuriatingly slowly. And the problems of the world, most of which weve created, are so expensive to solve that they are left to fester or are kicked into the future for someone else to deal with. Climate change is the most obvious one. Many of the opportunities we reach for founder for lack of funding or of the political and social will to carry them out. They are among the grandest, boldest and most brilliant ideas humans have ever had, confronting some of our biggest challenges. With a trillion dollars you could make them happen. At the very least, you could have a lot of fun trying. Such was my viewpoint as I set out to write.

And then coronavirus hit.

Suddenly, as after 2008, money has been found. In March 2020, the United States Congress approved an economic stimulus package worth $2.2 trillion, aimed at mitigating the impact of coronavirus; another $2 trillion ended up being borrowed/created in the rest of the year. Around the same time, the leaders of the G20 group of nations agreed on a $5 trillion fiscal policy stimulus. The European Union passed a 1 trillion economic rescue package. In June 2020, the International Energy Agency estimated that governments worldwide would be spending $9 trillion in a matter of months on firing up their post-pandemic economies; another estimate put that figure at $12 trillion.

Right now, tens of trillions of dollars in economic stimulus packages are being chopped up, partitioned, allocated, siphoned. What if we could spend that cash? If only we could divert some of it, scrape a bit here and there from governments and banks, or quantitatively ease a trillion dollars into existence and spend it before anyone noticed. Imagine the possibilities. Imagine what we could achieve. What, say, could the World Health Organization (which has an annual budget of just $4.8 billion) do with $1 trillion for a global SARS-CoV-2 vaccination and treatment campaign? Or if the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC annual budget $200 million) was given this sort of money and told to spend it on mitigating the impact of global warming? A trillion dollars could really move the dial. Thats what this book is about. Weve seen in the response to coronavirus that money can be found. And weve seen over the months of lockdown and social distancing that civilisational changes can be made. Indeed were coming to recognise that they must be made. Writing this I often thought of Lin-Manuel Miranda singing, in