NASA's mad scientist

Rather than bug your friends with your crazy, half-baked ideas, you should get a government grant like Ross Hoffman.
He's one of lucky handful of scientists that NASA's Institute for Advanced Concepts has basically charged with thinking up hare-brained schemes, machines, and gadgets like a shape-shifting space suit or a fleet of asteroid destroying robots or weather-controlling satellites or space elevators (like the one pictured at right), which might actually get built.