Space Time – Game Changers - The Door into Summer - thoughts on R&D

Charles F. Ducander July 5, 1960: “Mark Twain once listened to the complaints of an old riverboat pilot who was having trouble making the switch from sail to steam. The old pilot wanted no part of the newfangled steam contraptions. "Maybe so," replied Twain, "but when it's steamboat time, you steam." 

--- Today is space time and man is going to explore it.” 

“Mass-energy tells space-time how to curve; curved space-time tells mass-energy how to move.”  John Wheeler

I recently came across The Practical Values of Space Exploration presented to the 86th Congress on July 5, 1960.  For anyone interested in how the A.I, robotics, IoT and new space technology will impact our future, I would encourage you to read this report written in 1960.  Consider the challenges the engineers and scientists faced in 1960, what was predicted and what benefits space technology has brought to the world.  This report shows how space technology was a game changer for our world.  I believe we are poised for a similar game changer in the next 10 to 15 years with A.I, robotics, IoT and new space technology. 

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/19911/19911-h/19911-h.htm

The report begins:

“The United States has not embarked upon its formidable program of space exploration in order to make or perpetuate a gigantic astronautic boondoggle. There are good reasons, hard reasons for this program. But, in essence, they all boil down to the fact that the program is expected to produce a number of highly valuable payoffs. It not only is expected to do so, it is doing so right now.

Many of the beneficial results can be identified.

Those already showing up are detailed in the sections of this report which follow. They include the most urgent and precious of all commodities—national security. Beyond that, they also include a strengthened national economy, new jobs and job categories, better living, fresh consumer goods, improved education, increased health, stimulated business enterprise and a host of long-range values which may ultimately make the immediate benefits pale into relative insignificance.

Practical uses such as those just listed mean the taxpayer is more than getting his money's worth from American space exploration—and getting a sizable chunk of it today.

Nevertheless, if we can depend on the history of scientific adventure and progress, on its consistent tendencies of the past, then we can be reasonably sure that the greatest, finest benefits to come from our ventures into space are yet unseen.  These are the unpredictable values, the ones which none of us has yet thought of.  Inevitably they lag behind the basic research discoveries needed to make them possible, and often the discoveries are slow to be put to work after they are made. Investors, even governments, are human, and before they invest in something they normally want to know: What good is it?

We can be sure that many American taxpayers of the future will be asking "what good is it?" in regard to various phases of the space program.  There was an occasion when the great Scottish physicist, James Clerk Maxwell, was asked this question concerning one of his classic discoveries in electromagnetism. Maxwell replied: "What good is a baby?"

Now, as then, it takes time for new knowledge to develop and become useful after its conception and birth.”

This report was a call for investment into a new frontier but as the following quote highlights, many people question these types of investments:

"What do sputniks give to a person like me?" a Russian workman complained in a letter which Pravda published on its front page. "So much money is spent on sputniks it makes people gasp. If there were no sputniks the Government could cut the cost of cloth for an overcoat in half and put a few electric flatirons in the stores. Rockets, rockets, rockets. Who needs them now?"

When you are hungry, it is hard to set aside your seed corn for next year’s crops but if you do not, you will be satisfied in the short term but starve in the long term. 

If a drug has been developed that cures a disease you have, you want it at the lowest price possible and you may be mad at the drug company when the price is not lower.  If there is not a cure for the disease, you may be mad the drug company has not invested in the research to cure the disease.  There is a tendency to demonize the drug industry.  This attitude encourages fewer people to go into the drug discovery business and more into other areas where they can make money and not be demonized – like fast food, cosmetic, alcohol, entertainment or sports industry.

Byron Reese, in the book Infinite Progress: How the Internet and Technology Will End Ignorance, Disease, Poverty, Hunger, and War wrote.

“In 2007, the National Academy of Sciences published a six-hundred-page report called “Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future.” It contained this observation: “Economic studies conducted even before the information-technology revolution have shown that as much as 85 percent of measured growth in U.S. income per capita was due to technological change.” The report also cited a mid-1950s report that found 85 percent of economic growth was attributed to technological change in the period 1890 to 1950. Taken together, those findings suggest that almost all economic growth in the last 120-plus years was from technology.

I find this very easy to accept. And after accepting it, I apply it to the future and project that technological advance— and the economic growth it promotes— is poised to proceed at an astonishingly faster pace. If the rate of technological advance is increasing dramatically— and I know of no one outside of a mental institution who disputes that— then it follows that economic growth will increase dramatically as well. In fact, we are already seeing this. As Gregg Easterbrook notes in his book Sonic Boom, “In 2001, global average per-capita economic production was $ 5,000; by 2008, the average was $ 8,000, a 60 percent increase in less than a decade.”

Robert Heinlein in the book, The Door into Summer wrote “Engineering is the art of the practical and depends more on the total state of the art than it does on the individual engineer. When railroading time comes you can railroad— but not before. Look at poor Professor Langley, breaking his heart on a flying machine that should have flown— he had put the necessary genius in it— but he was just a few years too early to enjoy the benefit of collateral art he needed and did not have. Or take the great Leonardo da Vinci, so far out of his time that his most brilliant concepts were utterly unbuildable.”

I like Robert Heinlein because he was an optimist and a futurist and wrote:

“Whatever the truth about this world, I like it. I’ve found my Door into Summer and I would not time-travel again for fear of getting off at the wrong station. Maybe my son will, but if he does I will urge him to go forward, not back. “Back” is for emergencies; the future is better than the past. Despite the crepehangers, romanticists, and anti-intellectuals, the world steadily grows better because the human mind, applying itself to environment, makes it better. With hands... with tools... with horse sense and science and engineering.”

Donald Rumsfeld once stated: “We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.”

In business as in science, I think of unknown unknowns as the void of knowledge yet to be discovered.  Thinking and studying about how other great men and women of engineering, science and business stood before the void to change the world for the better can help us turn our current unknown unknowns into known knowns.  These are the game changers of our world.

The 2014 GLOBAL R&D FUNDING FORECAST Battelle and R&D Magazine report provides the following information about R&D around the world and in the US.  https://www.battelle.org/media/global-r-d-funding-forecast

• US R&D $465B - 2.8% of U.S. GDP - $16.6T PPP (2014)
• World R&D $1.6T - GDP 1.8% of GDP - $88.7 T (2014)
• Life science industry includes biopharmaceuticals (85% of all expenditures), medical instruments and devices, animal/ agricultural bioscience and commercial research and testing.
  • life science R&D ($92.6B) - 46% of the global total ($201.3B)
  • 3.2 billion prescriptions per year, $350 billion per year. Eric Topol
  • The size of the illegal U.S. drug market $200B - $750B per year
    • https://247wallst.com/economy/2014/05/31/sex-drugs-could-add-800-billion-to-u-s-gdp/
  • The information and communications technologies (ICT) industry provides hardware, software and services that make up the modern information age, spanning semiconductors, telecommunications, productivity or security software, computers, tablets and gaming.
    • ICT R&D ($146.5B) - global total ($257.3B)
    • US Wireless Service Revenue - ~$190B
    • Apple $182B in Revenue in 2014

I support investment in R&D because it is one of the key tools to solve world problems.

I like the quote JFK stated: “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."

I know our world faces many challenges today and technology will not solve all of them.  But, I believe that investment in technology can make the world a better place.  Humanity is just at the beginning of an adventure of the exploration of the Universe.  By learning, reading and working hard on the “difficult challenges” of things I am passionate about, I am hoping to become a better explorer of this universe and maybe even change a few unknown unknowns into known knowns.

Epilog

Edwin Hubble said "Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure Science.“  Think of What We Can Explore and Create With 100s of Different Types of Sensors Connected to 100s of Billions of Things and Trillions of Sensors!