Giant research efforts like the one that put a man on the moon produce the kinds of technology that can lift an economy and protect citizens in times of war or disaster. It takes a government-size budget to fund those efforts, but the payback can be enormous.
October 2012 | by Neil deGrasse Tyson
Twentieth-century America owed much of its security and
economic strength to national support for science and technology. Some of the
most revolutionary (and marketable) technologies of the past decades have been
spun off research done under the banner of US space exploration: kidney-dialysis
machines, implantable pacemakers, affordable and accurate LASIK surgery,
global-positioning satellites, corrosion-resistant coatings for bridges and
monuments (including the Statue of Liberty), hydroponic systems for growing
plants, collision-avoidance systems on aircraft, digital imaging, infrared
handheld cameras, cordless power tools, athletic shoes, scratch-resistant
sunglasses, virtual reality. And that list doesn’t even include Tang.
Although solutions to a problem are often the fruit of direct investment in
targeted research, the most revolutionary solutions tend to emerge from
cross-pollination with other disciplines. Medical investigators might never have
known of X-rays, since they do not occur naturally in biological systems. It
took a physicist, Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, to discover light rays that could
probe the body’s interior with nary a cut from a surgeon.
Why not ask investigators to take direct aim at a challenge? My answer may
not be politically correct, but it’s the truth: when you organize large-scale,
extraordinary, inspiring missions, you attract people of extraordinary talent
who might not happen to have been inspired by, or attracted to, the goal of
saving the world from cancer or hunger or pestilence.
Today, cross-pollination between science and society comes about when you
have ample funding for ambitious long-term projects. America has profited
immensely from a generation of scientists and engineers who, instead of becoming
lawyers or investment bankers, responded to a challenging vision posed in 1961
by President John F. Kennedy. Proclaiming the intention to land a man on the
moon, Kennedy welcomed the citizenry to aid in the effort. That generation, and
the one that followed, was the same generation of technologists who invented the
personal computer. Bill Gates, cofounder of Microsoft, was 13 years old when the
United States landed an astronaut on the moon; Steve Jobs, cofounder of Apple,
was 14. The PC did not arise from the mind of a banker or artist or professional
athlete. It was invented and developed by a technically trained workforce that
responded to the dream unfurled before them; they were thrilled to become
scientists and engineers.
Yes, the world needs bankers and artists and even professional athletes.
They, among countless others, create the breadth of society and culture. But if
you want tomorrow to come—if you want to spawn entire economic sectors that
didn’t exist yesterday—those are not the people you turn to. It is technologists
who create that kind of future. And it is visionary steps into space that create
that kind of technologist. I look forward to the day when the solar system
becomes our collective backyard—explored not only with robots but also with the
mind, body, and soul of our species.
When I stand in front of eighth graders, I suppose I could say to them,
“Become an aerospace engineer so that you can build an airplane that’s 20
percent more fuel efficient than the ones your parents flew on.” But imagine if
instead I said, “Become an aero-research space engineer so that you can design
the airfoil that will be the first piloted craft in the rarefied atmosphere of
Mars.” “Become a biologist because we need people to look for life, not only on
Mars but also on Europa and elsewhere in the galaxy.” “Become a chemist because
we want to understand more about the elements on the moon and the molecules in
space.” When you put that kind of vision out there, my job as science educator
becomes easy, because I just have to point them to it and the ambition rises up
in the students. The flame gets lit, and they’re self-guided on the path.
NASA’s current budget sits just below $20 billion—sounds large. But the
National Institutes of Health has a $30 billion budget. That’s fine. They ought
to have a big budget, because health matters and everyone wants to live a long
and healthy life. But most high tech medical equipment and procedures—EEGs,
EKGs, MRIs, PET scans, ultrasound, X-rays—work on principles discovered by
physicists and are based on designs developed by engineers. So you can’t just
fund medicine; you have to fund the rest of what’s going on. Cross-pollination
is fundamental to the enterprise.
What happens if you double NASA’s budget? The vision becomes big—it becomes
real. You attract an entire generation, and generations to follow, to science
and engineering. Nowadays, everyone who spends even a minute thinking about the
next few decades knows that all emergent markets in the 21st century will be
driven by science and technology. The foundations of every future economy will
require this. And what happens when you stop innovating? Everyone else catches
up, your jobs go overseas, and then you cry foul: they’re paying them less over
there, and they’re giving huge subsidies to new industries, and the playing
field is not level. Well, it’s time to stop whining and start innovating.
Let’s not just talk about inspiration. Let’s talk about true innovation.
People often ask, “If you like spinoff products, why not just invest in those
technologies straightaway, instead of waiting for them to happen as a secondary
or tertiary benefit?” The answer: it just doesn’t work that way. Let’s say
you’re a thermodynamicist, the world’s expert on heat, and you’re asked to build
a better oven. You might invent a convection oven or an oven that’s better
insulated or one that permits easier access to its contents. But no matter how
much money I give you, you will not invent a microwave oven, because that came
from another place. It came from investments in communications, in radar. The
microwave oven is traceable to the war effort, not to a thermodynamicist.
That’s the kind of cross-pollination that goes on all the time, and yes, it’s
wacky. It’s surprising. There’s no reason it should happen. But it does. And
that’s why futurists get it wrong more often than not—they observe current
trends and just extrapolate. They don’t see surprises. So they get the picture
right for about five years into the future, and they’re hopeless after ten.
If you double NASA’s budget, whole legions of students will fill the
pipeline. Even if they don’t become aerospace engineers, scientifically literate
people will rise up through the ranks—people who might invent stuff and create
the foundations of tomorrow’s economy. But that’s not all. Suppose the next
terrorist attack is in the form of biological warfare. Who are we going to call?
Not the Marines. We want the best biologists in the world. If there’s chemical
warfare, we want the best chemists. And we would have them, because they’d be
working on problems relating to Mars, problems relating to Jupiter’s ice moon,
Europa. We would have attracted those people because the vision was in place.
They wouldn’t have become lawyers or investment bankers, which is what happened
in the 1980s and 1990s.
So this $40 billion starts looking pretty cheap. It becomes not only an
investment in tomorrow’s economy but also an investment in our security and in
our dreams. Our most precious asset is our enthusiasm for what we do as a
nation. Marshal it. Cherish it.
About the author
Neil deGrasse Tyson is an astrophysicist with the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, where he is also the Frederick P. Rose director of the Hayden Planetarium. Tyson has authored ten books and served on two presidential commissions on the future of space exploration. This essay is adapted from his most recent book, Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier.
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