The news over the past few days had thrust Lu Zhou into the spotlight.
The founder of the Extrasolar Colonization Fund, the most expensive Valentine's Day gift in history... either title alone was enough to grab people's attention.
But perhaps because he had long since grown accustomed to fame, Lu Zhou himself felt little about the commentary surrounding him and that ten-billion fund.
Unlike the "imitations" that merely rode the wave of publicity to rake in money, he genuinely intended to make this a long-term undertaking.
Although ten billion was not an enormous sum-it could not even buy a building in Shangjing City, much less compare with the cost of a project on this global scale-the money would not simply sit untouched in a bank. Part of it would be invested to generate returns, while the rest would go toward promising, high-growth aerospace companies and rewards for groups or individuals who made outstanding research advances in aerospace.
Just as Professor Paul Krugman had said of him, although the fund currently listed only one beneficiary, far more than one person would benefit from it. It would benefit all humanity, bound together by a shared future.
While advancing aerospace technology and working toward the ultimate goal of interstellar colonization, as long as the fund maintained an annual return two percentage points above inflation, the money would grow into a vast fortune in a hundred years. It would serve as seed capital for colonization beyond the solar system, joining the tide of a new Age of Exploration and carrying those who dreamed of a new world to that unclaimed star system, spreading the flame of human civilization to a world twelve light-years away.
And this was the future he had described-or promised-to her on Valentine's Day.
On that overlooked star, they would leave