First I would pay off my student loans and my credit card.

My credit card only has a $1300 limit, but it manages to get me in more trouble than I can count on one hand. And none of it is directly my fault, it's the extra fees that "automatically charge for your convenience" that bump me over the limit right after I feel good about having paid off a month's worth of bills.

I would pay for my own wedding.

With the remainder of the money I would start schools in third world countries and see that they were supplied with books, each in their own language. Some of the money would also go to scholarships and research grants at major universities of my choosing.

I think I would also donate to a charity or two, though I'm not sure which ones. And at a controlled rate so as not to destroy the economy.

Honestly, I can't envision that much money. I read a book once in which the main character ended up circumnavigating the world in 40 days (half the famous 80). He spent the first several days on the island of Krakatoa, which turned out to be inhabited by very happy, peaceful people. The island had a huge diamond mine which you had to wear shades inside of, it was so bright. It was as though the mountain were MADE of diamonds. The visitor asked "why aren't you all trillionares?" at which point that if they shipped a big boatful of diamonds to port, they would flood the market and the diamonds be worthless as broken glass.

Instead they took a handful of nicer ones when they sailed for supplies to...wherever they sailed to. Bartering for supplies with a few diamonds got them a loooong ways. After a short while visiting the island, it began to smoke and shake and they all escaped on a big wooden dance floor towed by hot air balloons. Unfortunately I don't remember the name of the book, but the lesson has stuck with me.

Unload the proverbial ship a little at a time and keep people guessing how much you have, that is what I would do with the money, sending it to wherever I end up sending it.

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None to speak of

Hah! You won't have enough left over to pay the credit card... who you kidding?

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The only way of finding the limits of the possible is by going beyond them into the impossible.

Arthur C. Clarke

The Brain Science Podcast

That would be The Twenty-One Balloons, by William Pene du Bois.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

I think too much money can often be counterproductive.
In most areas, we don't need more money, we just need to spend it more wisely...

The Gates Foundation mentioned in the OP is a good example:
its main contribution is not its money, but its focus on tangible results.

I would make Robert Heinlein's Long Range Foundation a reality! Sort of the opposite of The Gates Foundation.

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Any day you wake up on "the right side of the dirt" is a good day.

T. Anderson

I suspect the governor of the reserve bank will want to have a word with you.
Secondly, I think in the end it will bring you more sorrow than good.
There is a story I heard from a friend (who knew a person, who was related...you get the idea) that big winners in casinos are allocated body guards, not in fear of them (the winners) being killed but from the "beggars".

Back to OP:
Firstly look after number one, me ()
Then all the goody fundgy stuff, you know malaria, polio, malnutrition, etc.

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This whole internet thing is probably not a passing fad.-Ronald Brak
While speech might be free, consequences cost.-Doodler

Depends what you mean by We and Money. The OP specifies "wealth", not currency, which makes a big difference. Some of "we" do need more wealth, others of "we" just have it in the wrong places.

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
"The Mayan symbol for "book" looks a lot like a triple hamburger, but I've never seen them claiming it as proof the Mayans had Big Macs." - KaiYeves
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

That is alot of nannys, but I think I could afford it

You could hire New Zealand to baby sit.

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In your rush to call everyone "entrenched" or closed-minded or "limited" you fail to note that the "limit" here has a very natural boundary: that point at which the evidence stops. - JayUtah

Science fiction was never meant to be an educational tool. - Editor Amazing Tales

Better to just hire Russia to do your fighting, they could use the money and have a lot of out-of-work soldiers.

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
"The Mayan symbol for "book" looks a lot like a triple hamburger, but I've never seen them claiming it as proof the Mayans had Big Macs." - KaiYeves
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

That's the funny thing about out of work soldiers. They don't stay that way for very long.

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In your rush to call everyone "entrenched" or closed-minded or "limited" you fail to note that the "limit" here has a very natural boundary: that point at which the evidence stops. - JayUtah

Science fiction was never meant to be an educational tool. - Editor Amazing Tales

See? See? Airship!

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Quaeso quousque humi defixa tua mens erit? Nonne aspicis, quae in templa veneris?

Hitler, Tojo, Napoleon, the Romans, Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, already tried that. The communists, Mao, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, tried it "from inside". Doesn't work very well these days, unless you are willing to "make a desert & call it peace".. Cheney's trained monkey, Dubya, tried it with no better luck. The Allah-boys will try it, opposed by the YHWH-boys.

is this too much politics for this forum? Am I politically incorrect here?

Birth control for the whole world, permanent sterilisation of man & woman after ONE child for every couple for the next five or ten generations, coupled with permanent sterilisation of all childless people as a 21st birthday "gift".. The Chinese to supervise it under German/Japanese/American/Russian/Indian expertise & direction. The Chinese have their own expertise in this & would not worry about being accused of "slow genocide" or anything else for that matter.
Might need Korjik's army to help them though. Korjik -- would you let the North Koreans train your army?

I will BEAT you...

I don't know why. With sixty-five trillion dollars you could minimize the impact of even 10 billion people on the environment. Of course, if you just don't like people I suppose it would make sense.

You could pay people to sterilize themselves, but to force it on people would mean war, and even with 65 trillion in the war chest, as usual it would probably one that no one wins.

What is your source for suggesting Francis Drake did this? I've not heard it before.

btw the population of England was 4.8 million in 1570 according to Wikipedia, someone said it was only 3m.

By "real wealth", I presume you mean items you could exchange with foreigners for things of real values. If it was just money, it would be just like the local bank printing it, and would cause hyper-inflation. So it could be like hitting oil. But even if it isn't just money, if you bring a large quantity of wealth into a country, I think it has to cause some inflation. The quantity of locally produced goods and services remains the same, and as you add in the large quantity of externally produced goods (which is what you exchange the wealth for) it is bound to increase the relative value for locally produced goods to imports. The consequence is what economists call "Dutch disease", ie, unemployment as locally produced exports become too expensive. Hence there are generally high prices in oil economies, (excluding those where the value of the oil is stolen by a small elite and placed in Swiss bank accounts.)

I suggest this should be moved to Off-Topic Babbling.

Doesn't matter if its currency or wealth.
At the quantities discussed here, the first would just ruin the economy even faster.

Finally someone who started to think it through

I´d found an enlightened dictatorship. A scientist-philosopher government. No more stupidity. The masses would be educated by force [force, not violence].

How? No idea...

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What brings us together is stronger than what pulls us apart

21? Why? Shouldn't we encourage people to have children later in life, when they're more financially sound? Further, while I had a child with an exboyfriend, I didn't keep her; I gave her up for adoption. Am I not to be allowed to have and raise a child on my own, simply because I'm ten years older than your cut-off age and had a child essentially for someone else?

Or, faint hope, were you being tongue-in-cheek?

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Partly tongue in cheek, yes. I think the world is overpopulated & when you do away with malaria you would have to feed the enormous numbers, Africa cannot ever feed the numbers there now. In +/- 1900 in a country like Malawi there were about 300,000 people. Even with malaria, dysentry, measles, whooping cough etc rampant , once the "evil" British colonialists did away with slave raids by Arabs, Portuguese & Angoni raids and provided a measure of peace and freedom from epidemics ( malaria counts as an endemic disease, the epidemics i have in mind were smallpox, bubonic plague, typhoid) the population by 1964 jumped to around 4 MILLION.

You will never solve the world's problems without birth control. My Rx was purposely radical to get people to stop & think.

As far as childbearing is concerned, the best years for it for a woman are from about 17 to 25. The question of providing "enough" for the children is purely cultural. Most of the world would say we take too much for ourselves & our children as it is.

I agree see my answer to Gillian above. Just be prepared to take more immigrants from countries that produce little besides people. Let S Americans into the US and E Europeans & Muslims into W Europe, unimpeded & see what happens. & before you stick the RACIST label on me please realise that I am one of the E Europeans in origin, born there, a long time ago.

Yes I'm just as selfish as the next man, or maybe more so, but I know what I'm talking about, first hand. Hell is paved with good intentions.

In fact, the bulk of latin immigration into the US is from... North America.

My fellow contrymen are leaving the US 'en masse', thanks to things getting brighter down here.

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What brings us together is stronger than what pulls us apart

The answer to both statements, which are true, is FOR HOW LONG ??? For how long without serious advances in the application of birth control??/

My fellow countrymen have overrun Britain, straining Britain"s social resources very seriuosly, have surpassed the Jamaicans in rates of serious crime ,& are hoping to gain visa-free entry to the US. Read the British press on line, almost any day.

Well, lets hope it´s forever, or for centuries, at least. As far as Brazil is concerned, we´re in a sustainable growth. We [well, they, the needy ones] won´t be spoiling your pretty suburbia for a long time. As for Europe, it can´t afford to reject immigrants, given their low pop growth.

Time to say so long, and thanks for all the fish.

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What brings us together is stronger than what pulls us apart

"Cannot ever"? Are you sure? If so, how?

I assure you that many of us have. However, Swift you are not; your point did not come across as intentional satire, just someone who hadn't thought through what they were saying.

Okay, but 25 is still older than your cutoff date of 21, and it doesn't explain why you would sterilize men over 21, as that doesn't really affect anything. Further, while those are the ideal years, that doesn't mean that the majority of women aren't completely healthy when giving birth well after that.

And, no, saying there's no biological "providing enough" for children is ridiculous. And that most of the world is only thinking of, well, those who have the ability to provide all that for their children in the first place. It doesn't take into account those children in the US who don't have enough to eat, enough medical care, enough warm clothing. Those children are forgotten about, and they are overwhelmingly born to mothers who gave birth before age 21.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Economically speaking, that's not necessarily a bad thing. There will always be a need for unskilled labor. By Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage, the greatest benefit will be obtained by importing their unskilled labor instead of producing our own.

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“There’s nothing that spells progress in large, friendly letters like trying to combine two totally incompatible technologies.” – David Szondy, Tales of Future Past.

I don't think there is any particular reason to think that the 65 trillion in "real wealth" would only be spent in one country, so I don't think there is any reason to assume it would push up the price of any one currency in particular. (Although that could be an effect.) But the sudden arrival of new goods on the market is likely to cause deflation rather than inflation. Let's say the ships are full of 65 trillion dollars worth of peanut paste. That's going to cause a sharp drop in the price of peanut paste. This will cause the price of peanuts and other food to drop, effectively resulting in deflation as people are now able to buy more with the same amount of money. Farmers and peanut paste manufacturers will be hurt, but not neccesarily unemployed as man does not live by peanut paste alone. Of course, it is a simple matter to increase the money supply to prevent deflation.

But just what form of wealth worth 65 trillion might be realistic? Or at least more realistic than peanut paste? Perhaps a space ship could discover alien technology and the patents resulting from reverse engineering it might be worth 65 trillion? Which is an awful lot.

Thanks providing a figure on England's population. The one I used for my back of the envelope calculation of England's GDP was just an estimate. However, I think your figure might be for Great Britain and not just England.

I don't think you understand what determines the maximum population of a country. It is the speed at which countries pass through the demographic transition that determines what their maximum population will be. Here is the wikipedia article on it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition

To summarize, as countries industrialize, their death rates drop resulting in a large increase in population, but then their birth rates drop, eventually leading to population declines, as in Japan and some other countries. Every developed country in the world currently has a birth rate below the replacement rate. As an example of the demographic transition in action, my sister has one child, my mother had three, and my grandmother had seven.

The faster a country passes through the demographic transition, the lower its maximum population will be. Malaria kills up to three million people a year, but half a billion suffer from it. This suffering is a massive drain on the economy. It prevents people working and children from being educated. It slows the rate at which countries industrialize and go through the demographic transition. So erradicating malaria is likely to lead to lower populations in the longer term than letting it simply continue to kill people and make them suffer.