[helene_t]

I used to dream of devoting the rest of my life, when I retire, to writing books. A minor problem was finding a topic.
- I'd prefer to write on philosophy but realistically speaking, I'd have to make a name of myself before anyone will buy such a book.
- My autobiography might become a best seller but I'm not sure if I'd like it to be. At least I'd have to use a pseudonym to avoid embarrassing my family.

Before that (when I was really young) I dreamed of making zillions of Danish Kroner (~ 14 Eurocent), then buying an uninhabited island, hand-pick some brave citizens from various refugee camps and turn it into an utopia. Then I realized that almost all idealistic rulers have gone into history as corrupt, incompetent and sadist, while the few that are remembered in a more favorable way were dull bureaucrats whose only vision was to avoid messing things more up than they already are.

Now, here's what I'll do: make something like Second Life, but then much more open, like Wikipedia. Allowing everyone to improve it by colonizing new planets, releasing their own genetically engineered plants and animals, making new universes where the laws of nature are different (as in Mr Tomkin in Dream Land), plugging other online services into it (someone might make a BBO-plugin for my VR multiverse so that you can sit down at a BBO table as if it where a real table), making drivers for new devices (as soon as smell simulators reach the market, someone will make a driver for my VR multiverse so that users can smell the flowers that other users have planted). It'll have to be a distributed system, of course, so that I won't have to buy a 10000000 teraflop computer with 10000000 terabytes ram but just exploit the power of all the computers logged into it.

[Winstonm]

I like the island idea myself - but not too small - Australia is about right.

[Al_U_Card]

No need to wait. As the universe devolves towards ultimate chaos (entropy anyone?) you need only concentrate on refining and perfecting each and every action that you undertake. Your reason for being here, right?