What would you do for science with 100 billions dollars?

[B.E.M]

Hi,

You are a scientific committee and you have 100 billions dollars to do the researches you want. The only requirement is that the researches must not have any hidden agenda and must benefit human knowledge as much as possible.

What would be the program would you suggest? Would you be OK to spent all this money in the International Space Station?

Thanks in advance for any opinion.

I guess the ISS must have cost about that much by now and part of the point of the OP is to criticize this.

There was probably a lot of waste in the ISS, unfortunately that is probably true whenever the government tries to spend a lot of money on something that its citizens can not easily evaluate the worth of, which is true of most science worth doing.

It has to be noted that the ISS was not just about science. Some of it was about moving towards becoming a space faring civilization. Some of it was about forging international bonds, some of it was probably because we didn't want lots of out of work russian rocket scientists selling their abilities to certain countries eager to develop their own rockets.

There has also been a lot of anti-ISS sentiment recently, people asking "what has it achieved" and "why are we just going around in circles in low Earth orbit"

There is a bit of a trap here. The thing is, the ISS has only just finished the "construction phase", i.e. a lot/most of the money has gone into running the shuttle. It was only after this phase ended, and real money was about to actually go into science (and consequently not the companies that ran the shuttle, that people suddenly started complaining about how little science it achieved and argued to biff the ISS into the ocean and begin on another construction phase for a moon base, which absolutely had to use shuttle derived hardware. Even after the cost of this program bloated so much that the lunar lander could no longer be afforded, and cheaper options that could have landed us on the moon with current hardware were demonstrated, and lunar plans were abandoned for an astroid mission, the same massive and massively expensive rocket without a mission is still being built to exacting specifications that force it to be shuttle-derived.

Well anyway, other people may interpret things differently. Go to nasaspaceflight.com to hear it from the other side I guess.

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Back to the OP, this time ignoring the ISS slant,
I agree with others, keep it small, you want something with measurable results and the ability to pull the funding if it does not produce them.

Myself, I think there has been a good development concerning the human spaceflight budget over the last decade or so, it has been the realization that HSF is not about exploration, it is about bringing the solar system into humanities economic sphere. More bravely, it is about space settlement.

The knee-jerk reaction is that this would be very expensive. I think this is actually a very moderate goal with obvious spinoffs for living on earth. In the process of figuring out how to keep a few hundred people alive in their own biosphere, with their own industry, without access to petroleum, endless water, unlimited oxygen, we would be solving practically every topical problem facing the world today. Reliance on fossil fuels, water recycling, alternate energies, reliance on the middle east, controlling CO2 levels, global warming, desert reclamation..

One of the things that makes these problems so daunting on Earth is the "tragedy of the commons". It does not do any good to not exploit a limited resource, such as fish in the ocean or our atmosphere, if someone else is willing to grab it if you don't, and gain a competitive advantage. This is why it would be so valuable to find a recipe that worked for just a few hundred people in an enclosed environment.

 

[phoenix:\\]

I'd fight to invest a sizable portion of it into brain research. In terms of that, neuron development, adult brain and how proteins help with regeneration of cells, research in autism, ion channels, etc...

I an also sceptical of the ideology of centres of Excellence, prizes and the accompanying hero-worship. I wonder if Science doesn't very much need a humus of mediocrity, or at least a plethora of unfashionable small-scale research on obscure bugs, metabolic pathways, families of chemicals and natural products and what have you.

Why study bugs and not bacteria? Specifically hypothermophiles?

 

[epenguin]

Why study bugs and not bacteria? Specifically hypothermophiles?

I was not using 'bugs' as a precise phylogenetic term, at most as a denotation of the large Kingdom Creepycrawliae especially Creepycrawliae obscurae that includes bacteria. As far as I know hypothermophiles get a lot of attention already including from industry.

 

[epenguin]

We have probably all heard of nice-sounding innovations - and then not heard of them again.

For instance every few years - but for decades now you hear of new generations of airships which were going to have all the advantages for air carriage of goods. And submarines now I remind myself. Then you don't hear any more. I suppose there is some good reason so I am not going to propose these.

But along these lines - well first a premiss. It looks like nuclear energy is never going to supply a large proportion of our needs although we could do with an alternative to the carbon economy. That's what this article http://www.economist.com/node/21549936 and a whole supplement in the same issue are saying and explaining why it is not an area you can expect innovation from.

However some years ago there was some talk and a bit more than talk about a magic bullet which was nuclear chain reaction topped up and kept critical by injection of protons and something called 'spallation'. The advantages were that it could not go wild and you could switch it off, and wastes would be a relatively manageable problem. It was being driven in Europe by Carlo Rubbia who gave it a fancy name I have forgotten. and in the US there was some sort of a plant. But I gather that has all been closed down or languished like the airships etc.

I wonder if anyone here knows what was wrong with it, and would that be a candidate for support?