Which MASSIVE problem of humanity do you feel would be worthy of a “Manhattan Project” style endeavor to solve it?
**
Energy / Climate** – This is probably the most obvious and popular. I have combined the two into one here since addressing one either solves the other or makes a big dent. There is already a significant amount of people suggesting that something be done far above the current levels of effort. This one has a unique difficulty factor in that it basically requires all of humanity to cooperate to change our ways. But in our existing political realities, we are failing to make serious progress. The climate agreements being worked on are pulling all the weight they can just get some incremental momentum toward a solution. Somebody(s) out there is trying to invent fusion, but without sufficient resources. What if we dumped a few Trillion into the idea of alternate energy sources, and recruited all the best and brightest? (Link to recent Bill Gates interview on the subject)
**
Space** – We live in a shooting gallery. In October, a meteor (asteroid?) came within the distance of the moon, and we didn’t even spot it until a few weeks beforehand. There is a chance of an extinction level impact any old time, and we put nearly no effort into predicting it, or what to do if we spot it coming. All our eggs in one fragile basket. Why not go balls to the wall to settle another planet, and/or scout for all potential dangers? And a space elevator or two on the side.
Aging – With the current state of biomedical research, I have heard it suggested that if we really put our minds (and wallets) to it, we could soon achieve 200+ year lifespans. But then what? Without solving some of the other problems first, what good would it be to have that many more people around?
AI – just build a giant computer to come up with solutions to the rest of the problems!
Food – I’m not even sure this warrants being on the list. I don’t know the facts, but have heard scary anecdotes and numbers suggesting that we are not on a good trajectory with population and food production, and the way we treat the environment to produce what we do now is obviously not on the right track. On the other hand, there is enough money to be made in this one that the free market just might solve it on its own. It also doesn’t seem to reach the levels of sci-fi tech needed to get to a better solution that some of these other issues may require. Solving the energy problem would likely take care of this one.
Terrorism – While many consider this the greatest problem our society faces, I can’t figure what more money could do against it. Ironically, this is the one we have made the most effort on, and have simply made it worse. America just threw two trillion at it in the last decade or so, and got nothing but a bigger disaster to show for it.
That last fact is partly what inspired this post. People often shoot down addressing the big things with “Oh but where would anyone find the money to do that?!” Meanwhile we managed to find two trillion just to completely rat-fuck the middle east, with tax cuts to boot. It leaves me believing there is no reason the US (and indeed, the world at large) can’t accomplish all of these and more if we simply decide to.
Anyone who has run industrial research knows that there are two stages to it:
Inventing something
Getting someone else to use it.
The second is usually much harder than the first. The reason that the Manhattan Project and Apollo were so successful was that the commitment to use the results was there ahead of time. And notice what happened when someone without that commitment took over in the case of the space program.
For climate change the economic and political issues are far bigger than the technical ones, so that is a terrible area for a big project. Get a carbon tax on products, and even better a carbon import tax on Chinese imports especially, and free enterprise will create lots of good solutions.
California pretty much cleaned up smog without massive research programs, remember. China can too, but it is going to cost them.
Space is a good one if we got the political will.
AI is an area where throwing more money at something probably won’t make it go any faster. There is plenty of industry incentive to make things smarter. Ditto for aging - we can make lots of money there. I agree with you about Food and Terrorism.
I nominate saving endangered species. Having seen the piece on the news this morning about the test tube puppy litter, imagine the strides we could make in saving endangered species who don’t breed well the old-fashioned way? We wouldn’t have to lose the white rhino, the several endangered species of sea turtle, and other rare and beautiful species on the bubble. Perhaps they could go further and perfect genetic engineering in animal species so that when the time came to break it out for humans (say in the face of a pandemic for which the last-resort antibiotics wouldn’t work), the capability and technology necessary would be tested and ready.
SF writer and conservative pundit Jerry Pournelle proposed one that I like: a massive science and research project to improve photosynthesis. If we could figure out a way to boost plants’ efficiency, from something like 2% to even as little as 3%, we could see a 50% increase in potential crop yields!
He proposed this before the climate change debate, but think of what a carbon sink this would be: trees would grow that much faster, taking up that much more carbon.
Now, there are various Frankensteinian possibilities…
Safe nuclear generators of electricity.
Large concrete boxes on the edge of the Pacific are a horrible way to go about it.
If we hadn’t already deplete the underground aquifers, maybe they could have been used for coolant.
Once we figure out a way to produce electricity, we can then get around to distribution. We waste huge amounts of energy by sending it over copper wires. N. Tesla was laughed at for his (admittedly bizarre) efforts to distribute power wirelessly. He had the right idea - just 100 too soon.
Food is directly a result of climate - sustained droughts in what was once prime cropland is now the norm.
No more strawberries, lettuce, almonds, or any other of the 100’s of products of the CA central valleys.
And, since the amount of water remains somewhat constant, the rain/snow the ‘bread baskets’ DON’T get will go somewhere - and you will get flooding. Maybe rice can be planted where floods occurs? You sure as hell aren’t going to plant corn or wheat of soy beans in flood plains.
Fusion can power desalination equipment. Fusion can drastically reduce carbon emissions. Fusion can change the oil paradigm in the Middle East. So many areas it would impact.
Another vote for a working fusion generator (which I define as an affordable model which generates more power than it consumes on an ongoing basis under real world conditions).
Poverty but I’m guessing that one is not just impossible for a Manhattan Style Project but simply impossible. Setting that aside, I would say say and/or anything related to that.
I think a “Manhattan Project” needs to be directed at a fairly specific goal like putting a man on the moon before the end of the decade. If you pick a nebulous goal like ending hunger or poverty or terrorism, you’re going to lose focus. We’ve all seen how these “war on…” programs start out big and then end up drifting. You’re never going to cross a finish line with something like that. So your War/Manhattan Project ends up starting out strong, working good for a while, then getting diverted by other problems, then gradually tapering off and winding back down to around the level where it started, and then leaving people with a vague sense of disappointment and failure.
Okay, how about an anti-poverty program with a laser-like focus on just one narrow aspect of poverty.
Specifically, homelessness.
Cities that have tried the “Housing First” approach have found it very successful, from what I’ve read. We should have a Manhattan Project to house every homeless person nationwide.
Some combo of additive (desktop 3d printer like RepRap) and subtractive( laser cutter like the Glowforge) that anyone can use. If it can print out cups of hot Earl Grey tea, so much the better…
It might not rise to the level of a Manhattan Project, but I would like to work out the cheapest, easiest way to provide a person with a healthy diet. Even if you didn’t eat it all the time, having it as a default option would be nice to have so you can just buy Bachelor Chow and have a guaranteed healthy diet until you get bored and want to go back to preparing your own meals.
Looking at space is one thing, but colonisation is a fool’s errand. Colonisation increases the chance of catastrophe: you are creating an incredibly vulnerable population, completely dependent on Earth for its survival, at considerable expense. Mars will never be a suitable lifeboat for humanity until our technology has advanced to the point where a man-rated Earth-Mars trip is trivial.
No, he did not. Broadcasting power, that wastes huge amounts of energy, because most of the power isn’t going where you actually want it.
In order to do a Manhattan project you have to have a few things first:
There must already be a theory of how what you want to make would work, thus making it primarily an engineering challenge. The scientists didn’t go into the project thinking, “We need a bigger bomb.” they went in knowing that if you could harness the energy of the atom, that you could make a gigantic explosion. Nuclear fission had been performed a couple of years prior. Doing a Manhattan project to say, colonize other planets is akin to Queen Elizabeth I ordering a crash project to invent a television set.
A THING must be the end result, not a series of recommendations. Fighting terrorism or poverty isn’t the type of thing you solve with a Manhattan project. Such a thing would resemble a blue ribbon commission more than anything else.
It must not matter how much the thing produced will cost. The problem with a Manhattan project for energy is that what is produced must be something people can actually buy. No one but the government needed to buy an Apollo rocket or an atomic bomb. Everyone needs to be able to afford alternative energy.
It may take a few Manhattan Projects. That was only ~$25B in today’s dollars for the entire project. I think DOE spends about $5B/year on energy research now.
Re: fusion, ITER is nearing $20B. Anyone know how much we’ve spent on NIF?
Unless the plan includes a cash-for-clunkers or forced replacement scheme, maybe 20-30 years from initial mandate to 50% penetration. Not including development time.
Here is something that would require somewhat less effort than a Manhattan project, is certainly doable and will go a long long way towards cerbon-free (or at least very low) energy.
A traveling-wave reactor is a different reactor design. It uses a much larger percentage of the energy available in the uranium and produces little in the way of long-lived radioactives (what it produces has half lives measured in decades or less). It can even use as fuel the tremendous stocks of plutonium we have produced as byproducts of conventional reactors. And we don’t have to site them on the edge of the ocean in an earthquake zone.
So why hasn’t this been done? Basically, because after 70 years of development, conventional reactor designs have essentially stabilized. A new reactor design would requires years of development, testing, licensing and so on and no private business has any interest in carrying this out. It is the sort of thing that only a government can do. But nowadays governments are not in that kind of business.