What visionary project would you fund?

No idea. I would expect that to be part of the research... especially if you were trying (for instance) to set up three well running habitats initially and come back 100 years later and find seven habitats that were running with additional optimizations that the initial three lacked. You want persistence, growth, and innovation instead of just grim survival.

If you seeded them with "astronaut quality" people then you'll probably get regression to the mean in subsequent generations, and if the initial group was barely surviving then their descendants would probably run out of luck. It seems likely to me that you'd get a more robust trajectory if you start with mostly average people from scratch, but with a seed culture that was optimized by a vastly smarter community to be something they can teach their basically normal kids to use, maintain, and augment in the course of living.

The personal satisfaction question loops back more brutally when you think intergenerationally, because the kids certainly never gave informed consent to be part of a traumatic science project. But if lives in such habitats are highly rewarding it stops being such an ethical dilemma. One way to look at it would be to have people live in weird places in exchange for having been given ownership of millions or billions of dollars worth of awesome technology... if they aren't "stuck in a lousy experiment" but instead "inherit stewardship of a treasure" then the ethical question mostly evaporates.

You just need to find a couple hundred for each habitat - seems easy enough.

You are certainly right that a lot of big pharma research would become obsolete if "robust rejuvenation" (i.e. 30 years extended life with treatment starting in middle age) is achieved but we don't want to stop doing basic medical research even if SENS works, You might not be that interested in producing more efficient calcium channel blockers, but you are probably still interested in calcium channels in smooth muscle. Aside from the aspect of treating non-age related diseases, we need to understand biology in order to make SENS work long term; one of Aubrey De Grey's key claims is that we know (in principal) enough about the aging we see today in order to know what to treat, but that probably isn't true for the kind of aging we would see in a 150-year-old. (This is not something De Grey is disputing).

Doesn't that depend on heart attacks being a function of age rather than a function of time? Anti-aging doesn't necessarily mean anti-arterial-plaque-buildup. I do agree that entire classes of problems might go away though, which would be amazing.

There are a lot of kinds of plants and animals. They interact. Their current and future distribution makes a difference, and it takes both general principles and detailed local knowledge to have any idea of what's going on.

Discordant Harmonies is about the idea of balance and stability of Nature, and that it's just something people made up. There isn't a reliable pattern of succession when a forest is destroyed, and that cute pattern of opposing sine curves between predators and prey has never been observed in the real world, not even for microbes in a test tube.

Microbes are smaller and more numerous and weirder and faster changing than plants and animals, and people have done much less to observe them in the wild, for tolerably obvious reasons. Microbes make a difference to disease, to digestion, to soil formation, and probably to a number of things I haven't thought of.

It would be very cool transhumanism if people could watch bacteria (probably with machine augmentation, I suspect there would be optical problems, and I'm sure there would be information processing problems) as easily as they watch birds.

At least, that's what I mean by microbe ecology.

I've actually been thinking about this, rather casually, for a couple of decades. For one thing, this kind of understanding would be necessary for a long-term closed environment, like for a large space colony. Also, it would be useful, like a seed bank, in restoring the earth if there was a sufficiently bad catastrophe.

I'm familiar with NBC, (nuclear, biological, chemical) for current catastrophic risk and GNR (genetics, nano, robotics) for possible future ones.

I'm not sure I understand the relevance. In-group bias predicts one of the experimental results: forming groups leads to increased conflict. My point was that a treatment that reduced this effect would do a lot to reduce human suffering.

Space and Human Survival: My Views on the Importance of Colonizing Space

Achieving Human Commitment to Space Colonization: Is Fear the Answer?

ADDED: Also she has an Amazon Listmania Why We Must Colonize Space that has some interesting reading.

You could ask politicians how much they've researched various questions and (in detail) how thoroughly they've considered alternative possibilities.

I still think that it would be highly beneficial. Think about Bill Clinton. Think about 9/11. Think about area 51. We could set a lot of conspiracy theories to rest.

Actually, I just read that for some reason. My take was that it was way too utopian, didn't give much thought to the endless ways people would try to circumvent it, and in retrospect its forecasts for American crime and global nuclear terrorism were hilariously wrong. (Although I am generally in favor of massively increased honesty and truth machines.) The writing was kind of wooden, but apparently it was Halperin's first novel.

Or maybe "the invention of lying". Probably less philosophical though.

Also, if/when such appears, it probably won't take long for someone to develop a counter: some means of making oneself (or another person) truly believe a given statement.

This actually overstates the difficulty - you don't need to make people truly believe the statement, although that would work. You just need to make the analogues examined mimic those of someone who does truly believe the statement. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see an arms race, with artificial belief driven toward honest belief in the long run.

I find it implausible for your level of certainty (and/or focus on listed scenarios) to be correct.

Essentially, my problem is that the charity I would like to support doesn't actually exist. (Yes, I'm aware of this).

This is why I specified it for an "ambitious, visionary project extending beyond 2020."

Cool.

It's probably worth distinguishing between people in the following scenarios being scanned and found to be a sociopath:
a) a suspect in a crime
b) someone found guilty of a crime by other means
c) very young child
d) adult with no criminal record not currently suspected for a crime

We should also first figure out how we're going to keep sociopaths from taking over the program.