Can we just throw money at the issue? Going to the Moon was an engineering challenge. We knew what was required, we "just" needed to do the necessary work. Som

Can we just throw money at the issue? Going to the Moon was an engineering challenge. We knew what was required, we "just" needed to do the necessary work. Some research advancements in material science were needed, but they were incremental. We also got some computer advancements out of the deal too, and sensors. Even the reflectors placed on the Moon proved to be very useful. For cancer – they are several diseases with the same name. We don't necessarily know what we have to do to 'cure' them (in many cases, once we figure out what actually causes an illness, treatments become relatively straightforward). Even if we just focus on one type, would throwing the same amount of money as was spent in the Moon program (or the Manhattan project) be all that's required to 'cure' it? I don't think that's necessarily true. Funding helps, to an extent. But many things in medicine just take time and there's no way around that. We still have no consensus on what causes Alzheimer's. A lot of research on amyloid plaques that may or may not be a red herring. Once we can know with a high degree of certainty what causes it, treating or preventing should become much more straightforward. That said, throwing money at any kind of research seems to be beneficial. Be it the Moon, health and even military. We wouldn't be discussing this without military funding decades ago that enabled what eventually became the Internet. Although we, as in humans, have been wasting too many resources in wars. > ushering in the information revolution a decade or two ahead of schedule would be an order of magnitude more valuable. That's hindsight. When coherent light (what we know as lasers) was discovered, it was regarded as a novelty but with zero practical application. We can fund many types of research simultaneously – and we have to. You can't take a doctor and get them to engineer a rocket, and you can't take a rocket scientist and get them to work on curing diseases.