It’s also the worst investment ever - if the same money was invested in solar farms and research, we could have actual world changing energy sources right now.
It doesn't work like a game of Civilization. Allocating resources to a research problem means you increase the social and material rewards for a certain type of person to work on a certain type of project. There is no guarantee of success or one to one allocation of resources. It's also not a zero-sum game when the money to one source of energy took away from another.
Also unlike a video game, the tech-tree dependencies are not obvious. We don't know in advance whether a tech will be a productive avenue of R&D, or if it depends on other unrelated advances in theory, material science, or computer modeling, or was actually completely unfeasible in the first place. I find wind power [1] as a case study representative, and we see similar stories for e.g. fusion, cancer research, AI
More money doesn't make the wind blow more often. And there's only.so much capital that can be spent on material science before you hit a limit on the rate of improvement per unit time
Bakary|3 years ago
imperfect_blue|3 years ago
[1] https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/why-did-we-wait-s...
huffmsa|3 years ago
pfdietz|3 years ago
https://cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/research.seas.ucla.edu/dist/d/... slide 13
urthor|3 years ago
The unsaid part underlying physics research is "if you fund us, we promise to whip you up an atom bomb in 5 minutes if the Russians invade."
Physics research involves precisely zero cost effectiveness justifications.
99.9% is the government of the day thinking "if we do this,
jimbokun|3 years ago
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