Let it never be said that PayPal's leadership team confines its ambitions to Earth. PayPal founder Elon Musk, who also created SpaceX, says he wants to live the final days of his life on Mars. But who wants to go to space if you can't buy stuff? That's why PayPal is now talking about how to create a payment system that can be used on any planet. It's apparently not a joke. PayPal President David Marcus wrote a blog post yesterday about the launch of "PayPal Galactic" (that link doesn't work yet), an initiative developed in concert with the SETI Institute (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). An announcement will be made today at the SETI Institute with moon traveler Buzz Aldrin and John Spencer, founder and president of the Space Tourism Society. To show he's serious, Marcus tweeted a picture of himself with Aldrin. PayPal says its wants to answer these questions: What will our standard currency look like in a truly cash-free interplanetary society? How will the banking systems have to adapt? How will risk and fraud management systems need to evolve? What regulations will we have to conform with? How will our customer support need to develop? Why start now? "Space travel is opening up for 'the rest of us' thanks to Virgin Galactic, Space X and a host of other space tourism programs including the Space Hotel that hopes to be in orbit by 2016," Marcus wrote. "The enabling infrastructure pieces are starting to come together, and as we start planning to inhabit other planets, the practical realities of life still need to be addressed." The need for a payment system off Earth already exists, he contended, writing that "[a]stronauts inhabiting space stations today still need to pay for life's necessities-from their bills back on Earth to their entertainment, like music and e-books, while in space." That problem has already been solved, however. Astronauts on the International Space Station have had access to the Internet and World Wide Web

hass associates review articles Think the Internet Leads to Growth? Think Again Remember the year 2000 in the months after the Y2K bug had been crushed, when all appeared smooth sailing in the global economy? When the miracle of finding information online was so novel that The Onion ran an article, "Area Man Consults Internet Whenever Possible?" It was a time of confident predictions of an ongoing economic and political renaissance powered by information technology. Jack Welch-then the lauded chief executive officer of General Electric (GE)-had suggested the Internet was "the single most important event in the U.S. economy since the Industrial Revolution." The Group of Eight highly industrialized nations-at that point still relevant-met in Okinawa in 2000 and declared, "IT is fast becoming a vital engine of growth for the world economy. … Enormous opportunities are there to be seized by us all." In a 2000 report, then-President Bill Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers suggested (PDF), "Many economists now posit that we are entering a new, digital economy that could inaugurate an unprecedented period of sustainable, rapid growth." It hasn't quite worked out that way. Indeed, if the last 10 years have demonstrated anything, it's that for all the impact of a technology like the Internet, thinking that any new innovation will set us on a course of high growth is almost certainly wrong. That's in part because many of the studies purporting to show a relationship between the Internet and economic growth relied on shoddy data and dubious assumptions. In 1999 the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland released a study that concluded (PDF), "… the fraction of a country's population that has access to the Internet is, at least, correlated with factors that help to explain average growth performance." It did so by demonstrating a positive relationship between the number of Internet users in a country in 1999 with gross domestic product g