Where no billionaire has gone before

James Cameron has lowered himself to the bottom of the ocean floor. The director of Terminator, The Abyss, and global blockbusters like Titanic and Avatar recently spent millions of his own money to take a one-man submarine seven miles below earth, to see what he can see.

Turns out it’s pretty much featureless and lifeless down there, and not many photo ops. But still. We have entered a new era of scientific exploration, one led by millionaires and billionaires, rather than governments.

How far will this exploration go? Sir Richard Branson, owner of Virgin Airways, announced last year the launch of Virgin Galactic, a private company that will offer would-be astronauts with deep pockets the rare luxury of leaving Earth’s gravitational pull and experiencing weightlessness for about six minutes. The price of this very brief space odyssey? $200,000 per passenger. “Book your place in space,” reads the website, “and join over 430 Virgin Galactic astronauts who will venture into space.”

Despite the repetitious ad copy, Virgin Galactic’s boast marks a really amazing moment in history. It used to be that kids dreamed of growing up to be astronauts. Now  provided they work hard enough to become millionaires and generate enough disposable income to afford $200,000 a ride  they can actually make it happen, without all of that rigorous Right Stuff-type NASA training.

What Cameron and Branson have in common is megabucks, something that governments  burdened by aging populations who require healthcare and pensions, thanks to advances in science that keep us alive much longer  no longer seem capable of even dreaming about. Governments are lucky if they can scrape together enough money to fix that pothole down by the 7-Eleven; there’s no cash for launching people into space or to the lowest depths of the earth.

Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic will soon offer rich humans a chance to experience weightlessness — for $200,000 a pop.

In truth, director Cameron, 57, has always been fascinated by the sea; hell, The Abyss and Titanic proved that. But as one of the richest Hollywood moviemakers ever, he now has the ability to make such lavish dreams come true  without the aid of CGI or 3-D glasses, mind you. Cameron designed his own microsubmarine, had it built, and with sponsorship from The National Geographic Society, last week he plunged downward southwest of Guam to the bottom of the Marianas Trench, into a sea trough known as Challenger Deep.

And then he sent up tweets from seven miles below. Things like: “Frak! I thought I packed that @#%* camera in my life vest… Arrrrrgggggh!”

(Actually, Cameron did take along advanced 3-D cameras and recording equipment in his mini sub. He plans to make two movies about the voyage, a 3-D one for cinema release and the other a National Geographic TV special. Believe me, this guy never misses an opportunity to make box office money.)

As for Branson, he’s the British magnate who owns 400 companies under the Virgin group  everything from Virgin Media and Virgin Health to Virgin Cola and Virgin Comics. It wasn’t really much of a stretch to imagine the multi-billionaire looking up at the stars at some point and saying, “Why not?”

In the 1951 science fiction film When Worlds Collide, humans are reduced to panic and terror when scientists announce that a rogue star is heading straight for Earth. (No matter how improbable this sounds, it’s not nearly as improbable as Bruce Willis playing an astronaut oil rigger in Armageddon some 40 years later.) Since governments can’t afford to build enough spaceships to escape Earth and transport earthlings to Zyra, a small planet orbiting the renegade star, before the Big Splat occurs, they turn instead to a rich, cynical, wheelchair-bound industrialist to fund the mission. Of course, in return he wants a seat on the first ship. And a wheelchair ramp. And an open bar.

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos — who also has a startup spaceflight company called Blue Origin — purchased a $42 million timepiece, and then left it inside a Texas mountain.

So here we can see that, as far back as the ‘50s, people didn’t believe that governments could afford something as ridiculously expensive as space exploration. Instead, they thought a bunch of fat cats would have to shell out for it.

This is astonishing, though not unprecedented. At the beginning of the 20th century, when the industrial revolution had produced its first titans of industry  the Carnegies, Rockefellers, Fords, etc.  these men who made a killing in steel or buildings or cars were able to amass staggering fortunes. These early billionaires eventually realized it might be a nice thing to channel some of this vast wealth into projects to help the world. Or rather, federal anti-monopoly legislation persuaded them that they might want to spread the wealth around  or else face jail. Hence all the library endowments and arts centers and charity organizations started by billionaires. Made a pretty good tax deduction, too.

In our modern day, we have Warren Buffett, who publicly urges the world’s top billionaires  people like Mexico’s Carlos Slim Helu, who earned $59 billion from telecoms, Oracle president Lawrence Ellison, or Buffett himself  to donate huge chunks of their wealth to charitable organizations. It’s not inconceivable, now that we live in an age where more multimillionaires walk the earth than ever before in history, to imagine these people doing something besides buying yachts and mansions. They might want to dip their toes into scientific research, for a start. Or reach for the stars.

Or maybe even encase a huge $42 million clock inside a mountain in Texas. That’s what billionaire Amazon president Jeff Bezos did with some of his wealth. The “Forever Clock,” as it’s called, is 200 feet tall and made of titanium and ceramic. Powered by thermal energy and positioned inside a remote mountain location, it’s meant to keep ticking for 10,000 years and, according to Bezos, is meant to be “a symbol and icon of long-term thinking.”

Then again, maybe he could have just bought a Timex.