[MI] June, week 4
Jul. 3rd, 2008 01:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
changehistoryI have no doubt that we will be successful in harnessing the sun's energy.... If sunbeams were weapons of war, we would have had solar energy centuries ago. ~Sir George Porter, quoted in The Observer, 26 August 1973
Never a truer statement, and not just in this day and age. Nearly every major technological innovation has come from research for military applications first. Now, yes, this at the end of the day benefits us all, but couldn't it be nicer if we just funded scientists to do things that would benefit humanity instead of having the whole "let's find better ways to kill each other" rigmarole first?
But that's how it has always been. The country with the strongest military force has the most power, and humanity as a whole craves power. So we race to arms, we race to get nuclear missles, we race to get to space, we build better satellites, bigger bombs, more secure intelligence...all in the name of "defense" because if we don't do it, the other guy will, and then he'll walk all over us, and we'll lose our way of life.
Things like green energy, environmentally sound practices, conserving instead of wasting--it's still the talk of the radicals though more and more people are giving lip service to it. But for all the recycled cartons we buy, and hybrid cars we decide to drive, it still serves no military purpose anyone can see, and so the research lags behind.
The day someone discovers how to make a bomb run on sunlight, that's the day solar energy will start to be widely available for everyone.
Never a truer statement, and not just in this day and age. Nearly every major technological innovation has come from research for military applications first. Now, yes, this at the end of the day benefits us all, but couldn't it be nicer if we just funded scientists to do things that would benefit humanity instead of having the whole "let's find better ways to kill each other" rigmarole first?
But that's how it has always been. The country with the strongest military force has the most power, and humanity as a whole craves power. So we race to arms, we race to get nuclear missles, we race to get to space, we build better satellites, bigger bombs, more secure intelligence...all in the name of "defense" because if we don't do it, the other guy will, and then he'll walk all over us, and we'll lose our way of life.
Things like green energy, environmentally sound practices, conserving instead of wasting--it's still the talk of the radicals though more and more people are giving lip service to it. But for all the recycled cartons we buy, and hybrid cars we decide to drive, it still serves no military purpose anyone can see, and so the research lags behind.
The day someone discovers how to make a bomb run on sunlight, that's the day solar energy will start to be widely available for everyone.
