| What
the president ought to do is obvious: focus the nation's mind on a big,
real and exciting problem. Ideally we ought to have a competitor to
keep us playing our best game—but if the problem is interesting
enough, maybe the competitor doesn't matter.
David
Gelernter
The best
thing that happened to U.S. science in the last half-century was the
Cold War and its consequences—one of them being the Space Race.
Americans cared about space in the 1960s as they'd never cared about
any science or engineering project before, and never have since. The
social catastrophe of the late '60s tends to obscure the spectacular
achievements of those years.
What the
president ought to do is obvious: focus the nation's mind on a big,
real and exciting problem. Ideally we ought to have a competitor to
keep us playing our best game—but if the problem is interesting
enough, maybe the competitor doesn't matter.
We know several things for sure about what this Big Project ought to
be. "Men on Mars" is not it. (It's a fascinating prospect, but too close
intellectually and emotionally to the Moon program.)
The right
answer will have nothing to do with environmental doomsday stories;
it will deal with people's everyday lives, making them better.
Nowadays
nearly everyone travels by air; it might be time to reconsider supersonic
passenger travel—but the solution has to be cheap and clean and
quiet enough to be acceptable, nothing like the Concorde; a hard problem;
that's what makes it interesting.
Or: a
nationwide magnetic (or some other post-iron-on-iron technology) rail
system. Or: practical rocket planes for New York-Tokyo in two hours
or less. Or: anything whatsoever to get people between New York and
New Haven in under an hour.
That's
the sort of science and engineering that changes lives, by manufacturing
time, the world's most precious commodity. (Maybe its only precious
commodity.)
These
are the sorts of practical problems that scientists and engineers (for
the most part) no longer give a damn about. But transportation has a
lot to do with the nation's quality of life, and transportation is headed
downhill fast. For most people, travel is substantially more of a pain
today than it was in 1950. Why is that acceptable? I don't give a damn
how fast my computer runs if moving my carcass costs more time, effort
and pain every year.
David
Gelernter
Professor of computer science, Yale University
Chief Scientist, Mirror Worlds Technologies
Board Member, National Endowment for the Arts
Author of Mirror Worlds and Drawing a Life: Surviving the
Unabomber
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