Just because you’ve made a lot of money, that doesn’t mean you have all the answers. In fact, when buffeted by wealth, you’re unlikely to even identify the right questions. Case in point: libertarian technologist Peter Thiel, who thinks a lack of innovation will doom humankind. We’re certainly at risk from climate change and those melting icebergs, but I don’t think we’ll perish from want of ambition. Such big-idea projects may currently be too out of balance in favor of the private sector, but moonshots abound. From Roger Parloff at Fortune:

“When people look into the future, Thiel explains to me, the consensus is that globalization will take its course, with the developing world coming to look like the developed world. But people don’t focus on the dark, Malthusian reality of what that will mean, absent major technological breakthroughs not currently in any pipeline.

‘If everyone in China has a gas-guzzling car, we’ll have oil at $10 per gallon and enormous pollution,’ he observes.

But that’s just the start, because without growth there will also be increasing political instability. Instability will lead to global conflict, and that in turn may lead to what in a 2007 essay he referred to as ‘secular apocalypse’—total extinction of the human race through either thermonuclear war, biological contagion, unchecked climate change, or an array of competing Armageddon scenarios.

‘That’s why,’ he says, with characteristic understatement and aplomb, ‘I think the stakes in this are not just, ‘Are we going to have some new gadgets?’”