Money for science
Spending money on science has been tied to evaluating the value of spin-offs, assessing the link between technological advancement and GDP, and dissecting the metrics of productivity, but the debate won’t ever settle no matter how convincingly each time it is resolved.
For a piece titled The Telescope of the 2030s, Dennis Overbye writes in The New York Times,
I used to think $10 billion was a lot of money before TARP, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the $700 billion bailout that saved the banks in 2008 and apparently has brought happy days back to Wall Street. Compared with this, the science budget is chump change, lunch money at a place like Goldman Sachs. But if you think this is not a bargain, you need look only as far as your pocket. Companies like Google and Apple have leveraged modest investments in computer science in the 1960s into trillions of dollars of economic activity. Not even Arthur C. Clarke, the vaunted author and space-age prophet, saw that coming.
Which is to say that all that NASA money — whether for planetary probes or space station trips — is spent on Earth, on things that we like to say we want more of: high technology, education, a more skilled work force, jobs, pride in American and human innovation, not to mention greater cosmic awareness, a dose of perspective on our situation here among the stars.
And this is a letter from Todd Huffman, a particle physicist at Oxford, to The Guardian:
Simon Jenkins parrots a cry that I have heard a few times during my career as a research scientist in high-energy physics (Pluto trumps prisons when we spend public money, 17 July). He is unimaginatively concerned that the £34m a year spent by the UK at Cern (and a similar amount per year would have been spent on the New Horizons probe to Pluto) is not actually money well spent.
Yet I read his article online using the world wide web, which was developed initially by and for particle physicists. I did this using devices with integrated circuits partly perfected for the aerospace industry. The web caused the longest non-wartime economic boom in recorded history, during the 90s. The industries spawned by integrated circuits are simply too numerous to count and would have been impossible to predict when that first transistor was made in the 50s. It is a failure of society that funnels such economic largesse towards hedge-fund managers and not towards solving the social ills Mr Jenkins rightly exposes.
Conflict of interest? Not really. Science is being cornered from all sides and if anyone’s going to defend its practice, it’s going to be scientists. But we’re often so ready to confuse participation for investment, and at the first hint of any allegation of conflict, don’t wait to verify matters for ourselves.
I’m sure Yuri Milner’s investment of $100 million today to help the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence will be questioned, too, despite Stephen Hawking’s moving endorsement of it:
Somewhere in the cosmos, perhaps, intelligent life may be watching these lights of ours, aware of what they mean. Or do our lights wander a lifeless cosmos — unseen beacons, announcing that here, on one rock, the Universe discovered its existence. Either way, there is no bigger question. It’s time to commit to finding the answer – to search for life beyond Earth. We are alive. We are intelligent. We must know.
Pursuits like exploring the natural world around us are, I think, what we’re meant to do as humans, what we must do when we can, and what we must ultimately aspire to.
