2 ms·
Slightly tangential, but this amazing scientific work makes me wonder how much more we could have achieved over the last 30-40 years, had we diverted even a sma
by blisterpeanuts 5y ago
Slightly tangential, but this amazing scientific work makes me wonder how much more we could have achieved over the last 30-40 years, had we diverted even a small fraction of military funding to science and space research. Say, $100B/year.
LLNL's budget is $2.5 billion. The entire Nasa budget is around $25B/year; NSF is $8.5B. It's true that there's also military R&D and of course the majority of R&D is private sector[1], but just saying, what a shame that there isn't more of a national focus.
Not only should we be spending more on civil R&D, but what did we gain from that military expenditure, for example the couple of trillion we poured into Afghan for 20 years?
1. https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsb20203/cross-national-comparisons-of-r-d-performance https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsb20203/cross-national-compariso...
- ttraub 5y agoRaising budgets don't intrinsically guarantee better results. Would a larger staff of physicists etc. lead to more breakthroughs or quicker results? Or would it just be piddled away in frivolous experiments, nicer Aeron chairs and the like? A physicist friend from NSF told me once that $50 billion would be about right.
- jatone 5y agodepends on where the bottle necks in the research are. I doubt its man power. its most likely production of the various parts. generally speaking you don't get great returns on increasing the number of scientists. you do get great returns by speeding up the production of data.