If there had been no urgent reason to be the first to get an atom bomb, wouldn't the world be much better off if the Manhattan Project had taken the Calico stra

If there had been no urgent reason to be the first to get an atom bomb, wouldn't the world be much better off if the Manhattan Project had taken the Calico strategy? We'd have a much wider array of advances in many different disciplines, and the knowledge would be spread out among many institutions, rather than locked away under one roof. And maybe we wouldn't have an atom bomb, which is a good thing in my hypothetical world where nobody else is trying to make one. > Calico probably thinks of itself as the Manhattan Project. I think it's clear that they don't. Their stated mission is not "cure death", it's "devise interventions that enable people to lead longer and healthier lives." They hope to "build a Bell Labs of aging research." This is not Manhattan project talk, this is what you say when you want to support an ecosystem of research, and you have no idea what the outcomes will be. If you're trying to improve the world, which is what they say, I think Bell Labs is a much better model than the Manhattan Project. > No wonder our grandparents could get big things done, and we can't. What do you mean by this? Do you not see stuff like LHC and LIGO as "big things"? What big problems do you see today that our grandparents would have solved by now?