[EthanHeilman]

With Trump it appears a window is closing on the development of important technologies and research. I doubt we will enter a new dark age, but in some areas, progress is likely to slow, which in turn will be used as evidence that it isn't worth funding, which will cause funding cuts and result in even slower progress. Everyone is racing to get stuff done, because there might not be the money tomorrow. It seems likely to me that longer term, more ambitious projects are probably being sidelined because there isn't time to complete them before the pencil pushers in the whitehouse defund them.

Look at how the Nixon administration and congress gutted NASA. It took nearly 40 years to crawl out of the hole in the roadmaps that their shortsighted stupidity created. We could have had reusable rockets, aerospike engines and Nuclear Thermal Propulsion in the early 1980s. Instead we got halfway measures like the space shuttle and the ISS that both ate budget but didn't create the required innovation for lower cost to orbit.

[nyc_data_geek1]

My feeling is that rather than a snuffing out, we are witnessing a passing of the torch of the light of progress.

Better start learning mandarin.

[EthanHeilman]

Science works better with collaboration. If China and Europe have to take up the slack from a self-inflicted wound to US research, science as a whole suffers. There is far more science to do than scientists and when science funding gets canceled the number of scientist decrease.

After the US canceled the SSC, Europe built the LHC. The LHC isn't a one for one replacement of the SSC, but it would probably not have been built if the SSC had been built. What scientific projects would Europe have built instead? What did we lose?

[toss1]

>>I doubt we will enter a new dark age

But only to the extent that the regime fails to get its way.

If the regime continues, they will definitely push us back to a dark age, partially intentionally, partially through not caring about the future or being too stupid to figure out the consequences. And Theil, Musk, Vance and that whole lot are part of the crew pushing for that — technology for me but not for thee.

[gigatexal]

I couldn’t have said it better myself. They will use this to say not productive don’t fund.