The weird thing about the Gulf Oil Spill: we (humanity…the US government + BP) have virtually unlimited resources to throw at this problem; the best minds of industry & academia working around the clock; and it’s not like curing cancer – it’s just a mechanical / engineering problem. And yet it seems to be insoluble.
I can’t think of a precedent for this.
Has there ever been a problem that modern science couldn’t fix with unlimited resources?
Global warming.
The underground mine fire in Centralia, perhaps. Centralia, Pennsylvania - Wikipedia
It has been burning for 4 decades, and is just not feasible to extinguish, so the town has been abandoned.
harsh environments can limit what you can do. human activity in polar regions has absolute and seasonal limitations. you might get yourself there without lots of solutions when problems occur.
They may have unlimited resources but
a) They aren’t using them
b) They don’t have unlimited time to apply unlimited resources
c) The amount of resources is irrelevant if they’re not applicable to the situation
I mean for 500 billion I’m sure you could build a heated cap capable of venting any sublimated hydrates and then closing shut to prevent oil from passing through while not being crushed under hundreds of atmosphere’s of pressure. But that would take time, at which point the newly drilled well will be in place and diverting the flow. So waste of resources.
Cancer? AIDS? The common cold?
I meant to specifically exclude a problem that would require research, development, a breakthrough in heretofore uncharted realms. That’s why I said “it’s not like curing cancer”, and put the word “engineering” in the thread title.
The underground mine fire is probably the closest thing to a precedent.
What makes you think BP and the US government have unlimited resources?
But why apply unlimited resources to something that is limited? The mine fire’s impact has been addressed. CO[sub]2[/sub] pollution costs nothing, and the town died. That likely cost less than whatever resources would be required to put the fire out.
The US government can incur as much debt as it feels like. And it exerts a certain amount of clout – would anyone turn down a request to work on this problem?
And BP made a *profit *of $6B in Q110. That’s a pretty deep pocket.
Then you’ve certainly excluded the premise presented in your OP with regard to the oil spill.
I think what’s happened is that we’ve managed to create a situation that looks (to the ignorant observer, like me) that it should be a simple mechanical problem – but due to the hostile environment, it requires curing cancer.
So the moral of the story is that we’re “outdriving our headlights”. We have the technical know-how to drill for oil a mile below the surface, but don’t have the know-how to fix it if it breaks. And that’s a sobering thought.
Unlimited resources implies unlimited time. Unfortunately, time is the problem here. The Gulf Oil Spill is releasing thousands of gallons of oil a day. It if were the same amount per year, it wouldn’t be anything near this level of a problem. One of the news personalities quoted someone as saying that this spill is the equivalent of ‘Landing on the moon, without having considered how to make the return trip’. Something of an exagerration, but it points out that the problem in the Gulf is not due to a lack of engineering knowledge or resources, but the knowledge of this circumstance, that ‘research’ thing. Search for internets for the accidental draining of a lake (more oil drilling), the Aral Sea, the Salton Sea for more examples.
It was ever thus. Why do you think you have headlights now?
Commercial Fusion Power Reactors.
Throwing money does not always produce a solution to hard a problem.
Bah - hardly and money. ITER is listed at ~10 Billion dollars (so triple that to 30) and take 30 years.
$333 Million - $1 Billion a year ain’t much. Take the original cost of $333 million a year and say 30% is labour at a loaded labour rate of 100k/year. You’d be paying for 1000 people. Not much really.
The phrase means that you’re driving so fast that your headlights are useless – by the time you see something in your headlights, you can’t stop quickly enough to avoid hitting it.
No kidding. My point is headlights are a technology developed so you DON’T crash into trees while going at great speed in the dark. Meaning they developed after people crashed into trees while going at great speeds in the dark.
And no, headlight may not be the best example but it dovetailed nicely into your post.
The problem is not insoluble. We know that a relief well will work. It’s worked before.
It won’t work until at least August, but it will work.
So the entire premise of the OP is wrong. The only thing we don’t have is a quick and easy fix that works in an area harder to work in than any before.
That happens all the time. It’s the nature of the world not to spend huge amounts of money to be prepared to fix problems that haven’t yet occurred, even when you should know better.
So insoluble? Unprecedented? Unlimited resources? None of these words remotely apply. You’re just noticing because it’s happening to us.
What does produce a solution to hard a problem? 
Anyway, I get what you’re saying. Reminds of the problem when the Hubble Space Telescope first went up, and it was discovered that it wasn’t focusing right. Someone mentioned that the $4 billion telescope was working just as well as a $10 telescope placed on top of a pile 4 billion $1 bills.