Putting a bit finer point on the funding matter - the gummint, primarily the DOD, funds things that look to have a national security benefit. Other funding comes from those who see a profit in the enterprise. Very little money goes to what’s called basic research, because, in the largest sense, in this country, there’s very little interest in knowledge, per se. We are an anti-intellectual nation and that’s revealed, among other places, in the way we spend our money.
Are there other countries that put more money into basic research? Can you give us a citation showing how much money those nations spend on basic research as compared to the U.S.?
Even research has to have a useful purpose. You just can’t say “I want a million dollars to look at something 'cause it’s cool.”
Like the OP said “Only 3% has been discovered.” Well if 97% is undiscovered how do you know the total before you research it? You need to answer questions like these to get money.
More importantly you must show cause. Even if you get money, or are able to get past stage one, you have to show that the money you get will lead to an end, as opposed to just more requests for money.
Research to farm the oceans was big in the 60s and up to the mid 70s when environmentalists realized it’s probably best to leave the ocean alone as it forms the base of the food chain. You don’t want to disturb that.
That’s not really accurate. True, a lot of government research money goes into applied research, especially in the DOD where it’s used to develop new hardware for the military. But even then, the US leads the world in basic research spending. From the AAAS chart I linked to previously, they estimate around $30 billion in basic research, $30 billion in non-defense applied research, and $86 for defense R&D. So basic research gets a pretty generous amount of funding. And no other country outspends the US in absolute monetary terms, though some do spend a greater percent of GDP on basic research. I can’t find a good chart comparing basic research spending in a direct way, but there are a bunch of relative comparisons here.
Hell, I work in basic research, and I really can’t complain that much about lack of funding. More would always be great, but my biggest complaint is the boom and bust cycles in funding levels. One administration increases the NIH budget, the next freezes it, the next dumps a pile of stimulus money. The result is almost a gold-rush sort of atmosphere, where lots of new people join a field with the funding booms, but then there’s too little money to go around when the funding dries up.
Probably the same place “you only use 10% of your brain” came from, out of their ass.
Or perhaps the 3% refers to the volume of the ocean that has been explored. The thing, after all, is not infinite.
NO part of the deep ocean is well-explored. I don’t knwo what the quoted 3% applies to, but less than 1% of the deep sea floor has ever been visited, at all…let alone explored. More men have been to the surface of the moon than the bottom of the deep ocean.
And, furthermore, they’ve only been there for . . . oh, forget it.