Into the future


My problem with government sponsored research
I am a science fiction fan.

Old school. Not in the sense that I want to dress up as my favorite character, but the kind who sits down with a good book because I know it will stretch my mind.

I'm a movie fan too, but I like them for different reasons.

Every old school science fiction fan can tell you how space travel was supposed to go. We knew it already. Heinlein, van Vogt, Campbell, Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke, Simak, Smith, and hundreds of others had already told us. There was no crowd more supportive of the American space effort during the 1960s and 1970s. We wanted men and women out there, we knew it was supposed to happen.

What we didn't count on was the Federal government dominating space travel. There would be no backyard rocketships. There would be no garage engineers. No, space travel was to be a product of the Organization Man, a top down affair where central planning was the answer.

We didn't know at the time it would cost the future. Most of us didn't, anyway. Because once the political "realities" changed, there would be no massive government effort to stay in space. Without the free market providing thousands of little incidental products and services, there would be no constant improvement, no drive to sell more, no reason to keep going.

And so the American space effort folded into itself. Without another crisis, the only development in space travel will come from private efforts. This has become an accepted fact of American life today.

Some things in science fiction have come true. Cell phones make pretty good flip top communicators. although I don't want to flip mine hard enough to do it one handed. You can get a color TV for your wrist. You can get news, weather, and video from halfway across the world. Our computers can do some pretty amazing things, and they are getting more powerful and cheaper all the time.

What we don't have is space travel.

To me, one of the most promising future techs is nanotechnology. I've been a cheerleader ever since I read Drexler's Engines of Creation. Potentially, it will be the biggest step since Faraday figured out the electric field and Franklin figured out polarity. Potentially, nanotechnology could put the tools to manufacture almost anything into the hands of every human.

But I don't want government funding. Not one red cent.

I remember the moon shot you see.

Every single time I hear about the desperate need for this or that scientific advance, if only the public purse strings are loosened a bit, I recoil. I've learned the costs to my sorrow. Broken dreams are never pretty.

You see, I am also a historian. And I know about the eugenics movement, especially in Germany. I also know about the home-grown variety in America where some "races" were determined to be inferior. All by "scientific" means of course. It was the direct result of state-sponsored science. That is the flip side of public science.

I am a big fan of science. I believe that it is the future. But not if it is dispensed by technocrats who have our "best interests" at heart.

We can not allow the government to sponsor or control science. They don't know enough and they are too beholden to political trends.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Fri - October 27, 2006 at 05:31 PM  Tag


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