I thought I was just being overly picky but this request shows that there are lots of exciting ideas out there.
Why do I see such a disconnect?
Lots of smart people are yearning for opportunities to tackle more ambitious problems, but many I speak to, mention that they don't believe capital is available for high risk companies. Contrary, like we see here, I hear investors yearn for more ambitious startups.
My take is that there's a mechanism missing somewhere between these groups. You don't just bootstrap and MVP a fusion reactor, to raise capital, you don't even go about doing meaningful due diligence beforehand, as these paradigm shifting technologies comes with a kind of event horizon, where projections become as meaningless as asking Edison for the ROI on utility electricity, prior to inventing the lightbulb.
I don't want to plug anything from our gracious host, Y-combinator, but we have started Unbelievable Labs, to make headway on exactly this Catch-22 problem.
My "RFS" includes: Electron-beam drilling, Nuclear Isomeric Energy Systems, Industrial-scale nuclear transmutation, Systems Biology for nano-scale structural assembly of macroscopic structures, Telekinetic manipulation (EEG+actuators), Electro-Hydrodynamic Air-Space Drive and similar "unbelievable" concepts.
We have concluded that funding for these concepts requires at least proof of a new technological principle, and we are scraping together a pool of capital from dreamy angels, as well as a cadre of possible scientists and entrepreneurs, and then instead of waiting for "somebody" to form a startup, and hope they will allow us to invest in them, we are funding the pre-seed, setting the team and getting them started. If we can convince larger corporations and nations to fund this as a kind of "Bell Labs" for the post-monopolistic world, we would have succeeded in our dreams. I don't think anything less can generate the kind of progress requested here.
Let's hope YC and others can accomplish this pivot from easy-apps to hard-progress soon.