I'm not sure what an investment in a particular far-future time would look like. Money does not, in fact, breed and multiply when left in a vault for long enough. It increases by being invested in things that give payoffs or otherwise rise in value. Even if you have a giant stockpile of cash and put it in a bank savings account, the bank will then take it and lend it out to people who will make use of it for whatever projects they're up to. If you do that, all you're doing is letting the bank (and the borrowers) choose the uses of your money for the first while, and then when you eventually take it out you take the choice back and make it yourself. The one way I can think of to actually invest in the distant future is to find or create some project that will have a massive payoff in the distant future but low payoffs before that, and I don't think anyone knows of a project that pays off further than 100 years in the future.
Maybe you could try to create a fund that explicitly looks for far-future payoff opportunities and invests in them, but I don't think one exists right now, and the idea is non-trivial.
I dunno, maybe there's something else I'm missing, though.
I'm not sure what an investment in a particular far-future time would look like.
Maybe like this:
Franklin [left] £1000 each to Philadelphia and Boston in his will to be invested for 200 years. He died in 1790, and by 1990 the funds had grown to 2.3, 5M$, giving factors of 35, 76 inflation-adjusted gains, for annual returns of 1.8, 2.2%.
Robin Hanson wrote, five years ago:
In the comments some people gave counterarguments. For those in a rush, the best ones are Toby Ord's. But I didn't bite any of the counterarguments to the extent that it would be necessary to counter the 10^100. I have some trouble conceiving of what would beat a consistent argument a googol fold.
Things that changed my behavior significantly over the last few years have not been many, but I think I'm facing one of them. Understanding biological immortality was one, it meant 150 000 non-deaths per day. Understanding the posthuman potential was another. Then came the 10^52 potential lives lost in case of X-risk, or if you are conservative and think only biological stuff can have moral lives on it, 10^31. You can argue about which movie you'll watch, which teacher would be best to have, who should you marry. But (if consequentialist) you can't argue your way out of 10^31 or 10^52. You won't find a counteracting force that exactly matches, or really reduces the value of future stuff by
3 000 000 634 803 867 000 000 000 000 000 000 777 000 000 000 999 fold
Which is way less than 10^52
You may find a fundamental and qualitative counterargument "actually I'd rather future people didn't exist", but you won't find a quantitative one. Thus I spend a lot of time on X-risk related things.
Back to Robin's argument: so unless someone gives me a good argument against investing some money in the far future (and discovering some vague techniques of how to do it that will make it at least one in a millionth possibility) I'll set aside a block of money X, a block of time Y, and will invest in future people 12 thousand years from now. If you don't think you can beat 10^100, join me.
And if you are not in a rush, read this also, for a bright reflection on similar issues.