I wouldn’t care about space colonies or make more money. I wouldn’t try to pollute the sky either.
What I’d do:
Plant and transplant big old trees
Mature trees are the best stuff ever. Seriously. The only inconvenience is the roots but if we can build smartphones and send rocket back and forth outside the earth, we can take care of tree roots ffs. If there’s some engineering and new tools to be invented well, let’s fucking goooooo. “Don’t worry, it’s on me” I’d say.
I’d create nurseries of mature trees close to every single city and make sure that we plant some beautiful ass, tall and luscious trees around our streets. They naturally cool everything. They give us the good kind of shade. Bugs and animals love them. I have no interest in using more machines to do something that nature does wonderfully well basically forever, if we maintain our tree communities. Let’s get it.
Engineer a complete way of building prefab, passive houses
It’s obscene that this country is so big, with so much empty space and yet we struggle with housing! How on earth is that not priority number one to solve this by spreading our communities more, and more intelligently? We can do that! But we don’t.
The way we build homes today is straight outta the 1800s. Same basic 4 by 4, same techniques. Why? Because that allows cheap labor to thrive (which makes big construction companies, big bucks). That allows cheap labor to teach themselves. True, prefab means COMPLETELY wiping out that cheap labor with more expensive teams. But prefab means excellent homes built in less than a week, how the FUCK isn’t it enough incentive? It sure is to me. Slowly incorporating that cheap labor into building prefab, passive houses (which require very high precision in the making) would be the challenge but, that’s when being a billionaire probably would help starting that. I’d build a damn “building homes in 2020 and beyond” university, you’d get a freaking degree and let’s fu-cking goooo.
In Japan, Daiwa House has been building prefab housing for over sixty years. They employ almost 50,000 people. Those houses are sustainable, use state-of-the-art technology and produce the least waste possible in terms of building (traditional construction is the absolute worse in terms of material waste). We suck.
If I was a billionaire, I wouldn’t care about electric cars or Mars. I would pour my money into this and rapidly creates new cities where people work from home, in houses that respect the hell out of Earth. Let’s get it.
Sustainable electric bicycle
We keep hearing about public transportation or electric cars but the best for most daily commutes is the bicycle. Electric bicycles are clearly the winner here and yet we have been extremely quiet with those. I’d pour hundreds of millions of dollars into something like the Copenhahen wheel (I’ve seen a couple folks using it in LA, they made me want to get one for sure) so that I can subsidize the tech and make it affordable (it’s $1700 right now, without the bike), say under 500 bucks and make sure we can leverage the trillion bicycles around on this planet.
I haven’t been on a bicycle in months and I miss the absolute non existence of parking, the ability to actually enjoy neighborhoods and notice things you never would otherwise. That’s Quality of Life.
I need to be a billionaire real quick so that I can almost even quicker, spend the money and change things for good.