Hasbeen, has the irony that you are using a method of communicating that was developed by the government - the Internet - to dispute the proposition that government funding can produce anything useful, ever struck you?

>>Wow, that's pretty good Tony, what did they do for the rest of the month. If producing a bit of plastic paper is their great claim to fame this year, when do we shut them down, for wasting millions.<<

About the same time we shut down the LHC. It has wasted billions and it has failed to find the Higgs boson: even if it does where is the all-important profit in that? You can't buy or sell a Higgs boson. While we're at it we should shelve the plans for the SKA: the cost of a radio telescope is astronomical and you can't buy or sell stars. But we can't just pick on the physicists. A lot of medical research is Government funded so that will all have to go. In fact the government funds research in all sorts of fields. But I guess the private sector will make up the shortfall if we just go ahead and shut it all down.

Of course we'd have to shut down all Government military research as well: you can't buy or sell things that are Top Secret or you get arrested for treason. I seem to recall that RADAR was developed through Government funded military research: it is of great commercial importance. And I bet that nasty little Commie Howard Florey was in the pocket of the central planning authority when he and his comrades figured out how to mass produce penicillin.

Science isn't there to make money: it's there to make knowledge. The knowledge can be used to make better tools and toys and that is where the money is to be made. But that usually comes somewhere down the line and it's usually somebody other than the scientists making that money. Sometimes the knowledge isn't useful for making better stuff: I think that's OK because knowledge has its own value and I think you'd be pleasantly surprised at how little of your tax dollar goes towards research and development.

Cheers,

Tony

It's even more ironic than you think, GrahamY…

The Internet and much of computing is not merely indebted to DARPA, but very much to Turing and others at Bletchley Park, much of whose work was based on predecessors ideas, including Charles Babbage's Analytic and Difference Engines.

"By 1822 the English mathematician Charles Babbage was proposing a steam driven calculating machine the size of a room, which he called the Difference Engine. This machine would be able to compute tables of numbers, such as logarithm tables. He obtained government funding for this project due to the importance of numeric tables in ocean navigation. By promoting their commercial and military navies, the British government had managed to become the earth's greatest empire.…

It was hoped that Babbage's machine could eliminate errors in these types of tables. But construction of Babbage's Difference Engine proved exceedingly difficult and the project soon became the most expensive government funded project up to that point in English history. Ten years later the device was still nowhere near complete, acrimony abounded between all involved, and funding dried up. The device was never finished."

Sometimes the payback period on the investment can be longer than anyone could imagine.

As an engineer having worked in electrical generation, distribution and efficient use for decades I am gratified in the faith that the greens have in me and my ilk to resolve the world's problems.

Unfortunately while there have been huge strides forward in efficiency and cost the second law of thermodynamics are not just a speed bump that that ingenuity can overcome, but a brick wall.

Wind turbines can get bigger and cheaper, but the cost of the land, the copper to collect the power, and the labor to install and maintain these systems which now makes up most of the cost is not getting cheaper, the wind is not blowing more reliably, the sun not shining stronger.

I have been following renewable energy generation since I was a 14 year old student at open university presentations 35 years ago and the limiting problems being discussed then haven't changed, and the issues around providing reliable cost effective base load are a long long way from being met by renewables, and renewables are many decades from being a viable alternate to coal and gas.

The only cost effective, reliable low carbon generation system that has a prayer of reducing carbon emission by 2050 is nuclear. The longer the greens oppose nuclear and push renewables as the only alternative, the further away the low carbon future will get.

Many Physicists postulate that the known universe came into being from nothing; yet baulk at the idea someone somewhere may eventually find ways to defeat the law of thermal dynamics? Catalytic assisted outcomes may well help that development; or prove that that formerly held as impossible, will become possible.
We once believed powered flight was impossible, and look just how far we've progressed since the first Wright Brothers' Kitty Hawk. Could anyone conceive just a single century ago, that planes weighing over fifty tons could ply the sky, flying at forty thousand feet and above.
Who back then would have conceived of the transmission without wires; of voice, pictures and text, or a man walking on the moon?
Today we confront an immediate future, where computing power will be compared with the known universe; and perhaps even enable us to unlock the secrets of all 11 dimensions?
Which may led to things like anti gravity/ artificial gravity? Warp drives and interstellar travel; and the pioneering of space; or even perpetual motion?
There is a place for even more Govt funding in the area of science, which has provided so much of what we take for granted today; including almost miraculous life saving medicine!
Perhaps an entirely independent body could be created to oversee or decide who and what gets any available funding. Rhrosty.

Rhrosty,

Your post is laughable. I would dare to say that you have no engineering or scientific background.

All you mention are discoveries and inventions, none of which even approach the boundaries of the basic laws of physics that have been in place for a century. If you are linking renewables being a viable replacement for fossil fuels to a unified field theory, then perhaps you are right, and we should expect it in 2100 or later, if ever.