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But that price change comes from them getting bigger and flying higher, ie- small incremental changes over time Re: the topic, I don't think it's an age of technological decline, as much as it is a result of privatization and financialization. The quintessential science project, the Manhattan Project, was revolutionary because it gathered so many talented people in one spot, funded them with oodles of money (the majority of which was actually spent on specialized industrial facilities), and got them to work on something that was known to be possible but still technically difficult. In 1996 dollars, the total cost of the project was $21 billion dollars. The proposed cost of ITER is about $15 billion dollars, spread over most every major industrial country in the world. That's a massive slip in terms of what we're actually capable of. That kind of dedication that makes the Manhattan project this storied metaphor for American Excellence, could only have been produced by a strong central government, willing to grab a lot of people together and get them to attack a well defined issue. But since the craze of Muh Tax Dollars, the idea of actually investment in the country with government money doesn't have the legs it used to. Further, the kind of people who should be working on useful technology are instead chasing higher wages in finance, working on what amounts of more & more sophisticated methods of gambling. It's not like universities aren't producing math majors! And it's not like there's a shortage of things to work on. Killing that rear end in a top hat cancer, nanotech, mind-machine interface (this by itself could create an entirely new industrial revolution), Quantum comptuers (though you'd have to do a lot more theoretical work before you could kick this into high gear), etc.
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Jan 27, 2016 13:50
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Though it's not just conservatives that have bought into this anti-science-funding mentality - I think it was Hillary Clinton in a debate who brought up the idea of a 'manhattan style project', but it wasn't for anything useful, it was for for breaking internet encryption so that the NSA could spy on people better, which for anyone who doesn't know how RSA internet encryption works is both a) stupid and b) would just ensure no one uses an American email server ever again.
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Jan 27, 2016 13:57
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