This “post”:http://unlikelyworlds.blogspot.com/2010/04/above-us-only-sky.html by Paul McAuley expresses something that I’ve been groping to articulate to myself.
We live, some believe, in the anthropocene age, an era in which human beings have massively altered global ecosystems, and which may have begun with the invention of agriculture, but certainly accelerated during the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century, and the oil-based economy of the twentieth and early twenty-first. But Earth’s climate and geography, and human history, has also been shaped by more powerful processes. Volcanic activity has been implicated in the Permian-Triassic extinction event 250 million years ago, which wiped out more than 90% of marine species, and 70% of vetebrate animal species on land. The Toba supereruption between 69000 and 77000 years ago created a decade of global winter that could have caused the reduction in human numbers and the bottleneck in human evolution that marks our genomes to this day. Ashes and sulphur compounds injected into the stratosphere by volcanic activity is believed to have contributed to global cooling during the Little Ice Age between the 16th and mid 19th century, and the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815 caused the Year Without Summer, ruining crops around the world and causing hundreds of thousands of deaths (and creating spectacular sunsets documented in paintings by Turner).
Eyjafjallajökull may have created all kinds of disruption to travellers, but compared to supervulcanism of the past, or to what might happen if the volcanic dome under Yellowstone Park lets go, it’s a mere blip. An inconvenience rather than a catastrophe. A useful reminder that the nemesis which may clobber us won’t necessarily be the product of our own hubris. Meanwhile, I’m off to enjoy a spot of peace and quiet while I can.
Global warming contrarians sometimes suggest that vulcanism provides evidence that human caused climate change doesn’t amount to much, but the underlying lesson seems antithetical to the sorts of blithe optimism that they peddle elsewhere. We live in a universe where life is fragile and contingent on physical processes over which we have little, or no control. As best as we can tell, life (let alone human civilization) is only possible within a relatively narrow band of physical parameters. We have no guarantee that our world will remain within these parameters.
As an aside: McAuley is a former biologist, and a current day novelist. His two recent Solar System-based science fiction novels, “The Quiet War”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1591027810?ie=UTF8&tag=henryfarrell-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1591027810 and “Gardens of the Sun”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1616141964?ie=UTF8&tag=henryfarrell-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1616141964 are unsurprisingly excellent on the relationship between the physical environment and social order. He has received much praise for poetic descriptions of the physical landscape of the outer Solar System – even better, in my view, is his intertwining of these landscapes and others with discussion of how they affect the more abstract landscape of social possibility. His earth – having suffered global warming and environmental collapse – is dominated by a kind of Green autocracy, which uses resource scarcity to underpin its rule (the imagined society is reminiscent of an old fashioned riparian empire). At the beginning of his novel, off-earth societies – which suffered through their own early resource limitations – have started to suffer their own internal schisms as a younger generation begins to chafe at the conservatism of their elders.1
1 SPOILER ALERT. This means, I think, that “Adam Roberts’ interpretation”:http://punkadiddle.blogspot.com/2009/10/mcauleys-gardens-2009.html of the ending misses what is interesting. Roberts interprets the ending as a fairly standard ‘just deserts’ conclusion, in which the bad guys get clobbered and the good guys win out. But it is much more interesting than that. The key victory is Avernus’s – but this is a victory of a decidedly ambiguous kind, one of encouraging profusion over allowing control. When Avernus’s various gardens begin to effloresce, they make it much more difficult for anyone to stifle change by imposing homogenous controls (most obviously: earth’s system of concentrating people into cities through the use of resource control begins to collapse as her trees spread). But McAuley gives us _no necessary reason_ to believe that the ‘good guys’ will win out over the longer term. Contra Roberts, the “agents of aggression and reaction” are _not_ “killed off.” Instead, they emerge in new forms – the Ghosts’ totalitarian mission to the stars and Sri Hong-Owen’s solipsistic effort to recreate herself as a set of ecosystems profusing across the galaxy. The more attractive sounding Outer civilization is not predestined to succeed – at most, it has a decent chance of surviving.
{ 71 comments }
MattF 04.19.10 at 4:49 pm
There’s a subtext to the fact that humans are a peculiar (and possibly unique) evolutionary accident: that there is something peculiar (and possibly unique) about evolution here on earth. Maybe it’s volcanic activity, maybe it’s asteroids, maybe it’s sunstorms– but there’s something that’s been regularly stirring the pot. So, gather ye rosebuds…
Pat 04.19.10 at 4:57 pm
Vaguely apropos of this post: I just realized that none of the libertarians who did that 10 influential books thing put down Guns, Germs, and Steel. That would have been the winner for the “I have considered that my worldview and possibly my discipline are completely irrelevant” category.
Nick 04.19.10 at 5:03 pm
So would one decent gamble be to go for growth, drive technological innovation, hoping we reach a point at which humans are able to combat even catastrophic natural events like asteroid impacts and volcanoes? Perhaps advanced nano-technology could eventually allow human life to adapt even in very hostile environments.
Stuart 04.19.10 at 5:12 pm
Surely a better gamble would be to increase tax by 1% or so of GDP and redirect it all directly into scientific research. Far more efficient at creating completely new technologies than the market system is, which is better at improving the cost efficiency and finding new applications for a given new technology once some government agency or university has created it.
Pat 04.19.10 at 5:19 pm
There’s a subtext to the fact that humans are a peculiar (and possibly unique) evolutionary accident: that there is something peculiar (and possibly unique) about evolution here on earth.
Peculiar compared to what?
So would one decent gamble be to go for growth, drive technological innovation, hoping we reach a point at which humans are able to combat even catastrophic natural events like asteroid impacts and volcanoes?
Sustaining life off the planet is probably the best way to do this. Deep ocean is more attainable today, but I would guess less permanent.
Perhaps advanced nano-technology could eventually allow human life to adapt even in very hostile environments.
Wearing animal skins allows human life in very hostile environments, and that’s pretty low-tech. The enumeration of subsequent technologies up to but not including nano-technology is left as an exercise to the reader.
Cosma Shalizi 04.19.10 at 5:21 pm
Shorter Paul McAuley: “Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.” (Apparently not Will Durant.) Not that I disagree about the merits of McAuley’s post.
Nick 04.19.10 at 5:41 pm
“Surely a better gamble would be to increase tax by 1% or so of GDP and redirect it all directly into scientific research. Far more efficient at creating completely new technologies than the market system is, which is better at improving the cost efficiency and finding new applications for a given new technology once some government agency or university has created it.”
True in public goods theory. False in practice: http://oxlib.blogspot.com/2009/05/myth-of-science-as-public-good.html
Government isn’t necessarily all that good at directing at scientific research, and crowds out alternative sources of funding at the same time.
Stuart 04.19.10 at 5:49 pm
Your source seems very weak regarding the point being made, and admits it: “while the analysis could find no clear-cut relationship between public R&D activities and growth, at least in the short term.”
Short term R&D projects don’t produce radical new technologies, and private funding for the extremely long cycle times of fundamentally new technologies don’t work as the business goes bankrupt long before it can expect to see anything even in prototype.
Steve LaBonne 04.19.10 at 5:57 pm
I can name entire industries that would not exist without completely serendipitous discoveries that would never have been funded by any profit-making enterprise. Biotechnology, for example, would never have existed without previous publicly funded research which generated abstruse, seemingly (at the time) completely “useless” discoveries such as bacterial restriction / modification systems.
Nick 04.19.10 at 6:04 pm
The same could have been said of flight (there were government research programmes working on it) had the Wright brothers not got there first. You simply cannot say what would and what would not have been invented in the absence of Government funding, especially when technological development was rapid before Government was even all that interested in scientific research.
Having said that, Kealey does admit of one or two exceptions. He couldn’t work out how some new drugs would be developed without, at least, Government provision for patents.
Kenny Easwaran 04.19.10 at 6:23 pm
The Eyjafjallajokull thing has been making me wonder – does the whole commercial aviation system rest on a mistake? As far as I know, 9/11 is the only other event that created a disruption to air travel that was at all comparable. But volcanic activity like this must go on decently often. Imagine how air travel would have reacted to the vulcanism of the 19th century. For a span of 1815, air travel around Indonesia and Singapore would have been disrupted. (I wonder if the ashes from Tambora were around as long as the sulfur dioxide – if so then perhaps air travel around the entire world would have been disrupted through 1816 as well.) Eyjafjallajokull was erupting constantly for two years starting in 1821. In the 1880’s, Krakatoa would have disrupted the Singapore/Indonesia area again. And there are probably other incidents of vulcanism that would have disrupted air travel – this particular eruption would have been completely unnoticed by anyone outside Iceland in the absence of air travel, so perhaps these things happen fairly often, and should be expected in a region with many hubs at least once every few decades. Maybe we’ve just been lucky that between 1960 and 2009, this never occurred at Mt. St. Helens, or an Icelandic volcano, or Etna, or something else near lots of major airports.
Steve LaBonne 04.19.10 at 6:26 pm
Yes I can, because I know exactly what I’m taking about in the cited example, and you don’t have a clue. Just to start with, you clearly don’t know 1) the difference between science and technology, and 2) the fact that the Wright Bros.’ achievements did not involve any novel science.
rea 04.19.10 at 6:31 pm
The same could have been said of flight (there were government research programmes working on it) had the Wright brothers not got there first.
Things were different when cutting edge-technology could be developed by a couple of bicycle mechanics in a well-equipped bicycle repair shop. We seem to be a bit beyond that point.
Nick 04.19.10 at 6:47 pm
“Things were different when cutting edge-technology could be developed by a couple of bicycle mechanics in a well-equipped bicycle repair shop. We seem to be a bit beyond that point.”
We’re also much richer now than we were then.
Steve LaBonne 04.19.10 at 6:55 pm
Which has fuck-all to do with the question at hand.
Nick 04.19.10 at 7:00 pm
“the difference between science and technology”
I am not sure there is such a principled difference. Scientific advances are often spurred by technological innovation, and Kealey, in the lecture I linked to, gives examples of very high-order science being privately funded because they are predicted to prove useful in R&D later on.
Also just because a particular scientific endeavour has no immediate or even conceivable practical value does not mean people will not voluntarily devote time and resources to it just out of interest and curiosity. I used to let SETI use my computer’s resources to search for extra-terrestial radio signals even though the chances of that search having practical value are close to nil, and the chances of that being any good to me personally really are nil.
Nick 04.19.10 at 7:01 pm
“Which has fuck-all to do with the question at hand.”
It does if we are thinking about who might be interested in funding scientific research on a voluntary basis.
mpowell 04.19.10 at 7:04 pm
That link is pretty weak. The whole point of funding government research is that the economic growth potential for basic research is extremely long term. And it certainly wouldn’t be constrained to the states investing publicly in science versus those that are not. So I don’t know how you would study that with statistical data anyhow. This is just another way for libertards to argue that the market is perfect- any useful research will be conducted by private enterprise. Lol.
mpowell 04.19.10 at 7:07 pm
Kenny: I think it does demonstrate that the business investment is probably almost always optimistic. That’s why I like to see companies pay dividends. Get your money out before the company goes under because air travel is interrupted for 6 months. It’s just not possible to expect airlines to make enough money in good times to cover those kinds of losses.
Steve LaBonne 04.19.10 at 7:10 pm
You’re wrong about that, but that’s a long even more off-topic discussion so let’s set that aside and forget the labels:
Biotechnology depended on a number of different, unconnected advances in knowledge none of which had any practical applications foreseeable at the time they were made. Purely curiosity-driven research has never, anywhere, been privately funded on anything within orders of magnitude of the scale that modern civilization now requires to maintain itself. Libertarians have a touchingly naive faith in the figments of their own ideology-poisoned imaginations.
But carry on babbling. I will now cease to contribute to this off-topic excursion.
AntiAlias 04.19.10 at 7:15 pm
Something similar crossed my mind. What if normally aviation would have been impossible on Earth, and we just happen to be living on the last in which, by some statistically odd conditions, it has been possible? You know, that ominous Lovecraftian “we-are-so-lucky-we haven’t-figured-out as yet” feeling…
(Not to mention biggies like Kuwae in the Pacific, whose effects reached Constantinople…)
AntiAlias 04.19.10 at 7:17 pm
Re Kenny Easwaran @ 11, I meant to say.
Walt 04.19.10 at 7:17 pm
Nick, you are generally polite on these threads, which I appreciate, but you need to make more careful arguments than you do. Sure, we don’t know what would have happened if governments never funded research, but we also don’t know what would have happened if Trotsky had ousted Stalin instead of the other way around. Maybe we would all live in a communist utopia. Anyone who gets to use the “we don’t know what would have happened” argument gets to prove anything they like, as generations of “JFK would have kept us out of Vietnam” arguers have shown.
Henry 04.19.10 at 7:18 pm
Cosma – had never seen this quote before – it’s perfect.
Substance McGravitas 04.19.10 at 7:22 pm
I wonder, he asked, if there are instances of the free market suppressing science and technology for the purpose of profit.
Nick 04.19.10 at 7:23 pm
“This is just another way for libertards to argue that the market is perfect- any useful research will be conducted by private enterprise. Lol.”
Not really. I don’t believe in perfect markets. I just have an ideological/ethical preference for voluntarily funded research over coercively funded research. And I don’t believe that political actors have especially long time horizons either, so I am not sure how the addition of Government funding gets over the hump of (alleged) short-termism of research funding. I think, instead, that a large number of people have a tremendous interest in the pursuit of knowledge, beyond immediate practicality. That interest could be expressed via democratic means (as now for the most part) or by voluntary means.
Pat 04.19.10 at 7:45 pm
I just have an ideological/ethical preference for voluntarily funded research over coercively funded research.
Hey, we didn’t do too bad when science was a hobby of the ruling classes. Clearly a golden age!
chris 04.19.10 at 7:46 pm
technological development was rapid before Government was even all that interested in scientific research
When was that? ISTR that iron working was such a closely guarded state secret that smiths were crippled to prevent them from fleeing to enemy countries with the secrets of their craft. (Speaking of Vulcan.)
Unless you intend to recant on the lack of difference between science and technology, I don’t think there was any time governments haven’t been interested.
chris 04.19.10 at 7:49 pm
What if normally aviation would have been impossible on Earth
Aren’t you assuming that there is *no way* to design an aircraft that can fly in ashy skies? Just off the top of my head I wonder if zeppelins couldn’t do better, for example.
Nick 04.19.10 at 7:53 pm
‘Anyone who gets to use the “we don’t know what would have happened†argument gets to prove anything they like, as generations of “JFK would have kept us out of Vietnam†arguers have shown.’
You are right. It is not a decent independent argument on its own. The point is to think in terms of opportunity costs. Government research requires resources; resources that could otherwise have been co-ordinated by private actors. My contention, on the basis of the history that Kealey argues, is that private actors have been seen to invest plenty and successfully in scientific research, even in areas without immediate application. Whether the state is necessarily for research these days depends on exactly what it is that they are purported to add to this. Scale, certainly. But are there any ways of voluntary funding scaling up to similar levels? It is hard to say because of the dominant role that the state plays in research funding.
“if there are instances of the free market suppressing science and technology for the purpose of profit.”
If you mean by that big or influential businesses using regulation or other powers to suppress scientific development, then most definitely. It could be a very useful protectionist tactic.
rageahol 04.19.10 at 7:54 pm
to address mr. labonne’s point, the chances of any technology company officer saying :
“well, there certainly doesnt seem like there’s a market for it NOW, but maybe in 30 or 40 years there will be some unknown level of profitability for biotechnology, so yes, let’s spend several million dollars to fund that robotic deep-sea-vent exploration just on the off chance that we find life down there, which we can use to build an entire industry. the risk is pretty high but the potential ROI is fantastic!”
is pretty f*cking remote, even for a sprawling hands-in-every-imaginable-pie company like GE or Dow
bianca steele 04.19.10 at 8:03 pm
chris@28
Were the crafts really literally “state secrets” (even aside from military secrets)?
If we’re talking about government sponsorship of science, arguably one of the most important things that was done was the formation of the Royal Society and similar institutions in Paris and on the Continent, to ensure discoveries were spread as broadly as possible as quickly as possible.
VV 04.19.10 at 8:18 pm
“But are there any ways of voluntary funding scaling up to similar levels? It is hard to say because of the dominant role that the state plays in research funding.”
We do have some data points: In countries where the state does not fund research to any great extent, such as libertarian utopia Somalia, Russia* , Greece, Italy, etc, has the private sector and volunteers picked up the slack?
* A grand total of 1.1% of GDP.
Nick doesn’t really know what he’s talking about…
Metatone 04.19.10 at 8:23 pm
Re: vulcanism and flight – diesel engine prop planes can fly… might lose some paint and windows if they get caught in the wrong place, but the engines are much more resilient to ash problems than turbofans… and can be made even more so…
roac 04.19.10 at 8:36 pm
Further to Pat @ 27: The last world-class scientist that I know of who was a member of the hereditary nobility was Louis-Victor-Pierre-Raymond, 7th duc de Broglie. Anybody have a later example?
politicalfootball 04.19.10 at 8:40 pm
Didn’t Crooked Timber already devote most of a week to mocking libertarians? Is that not enough?
Walt 04.19.10 at 8:40 pm
But, Nick, your argument is nothing stronger than “some guy says”. Certainly I can’t reconcile Kealey’s claims with the historical record, particularly the historical record for the Internet, which involved government-funded intervention at key points.
I can’t get the video to load, but that OECD report is not a particularly impressive piece of research. The source of productivity differences between countries is a very heavily researched question, and the verdict of the research is that it’s hard to explain the productivity differences between countries. Anyway, the point of government spending on R&D is that it’s truly a public good, which means that it’s not going to show up in a cross-country comparison. The US may have invented TCP/IP, but China and Germany still get to use it.
Talking in terms of “opportunity costs” is awfully textbook-y, and requires that we be already be along some sort of optimal production-possibility frontier to be decisive. Phrasing everything in terms of “voluntary exchange” is granting yourself an unearned rhetorical victory. The part of my tax money that goes to defending your property rights certainly doesn’t come from any sort of voluntary exchange.
Walt 04.19.10 at 8:42 pm
politicalfootball, I was busy that week. Okay, I’ll drop the thread-jack.
Theophylact 04.19.10 at 8:46 pm
On the question of when, rather than <whether, scientific discoveries will be made, a little personal anecdote:
In 1961, I was a summer student employee at IBM in Poughkeepsie. As part of our education, a bunch of us were bused down to the new Saarinen-designed Yorktown Heights lab for the day to see the sights and talk to the scientists. At the end of the tour, we had a question-and-answer session. IBM was eager to make the point that they were doing pure research there. I asked whether they had anyone working on organic semiconductors. The answer was “No; they couldn’t foresee any application.”
Clearly IBM was wrong. But organic semiconductors were invented, albeit rather later than they might have been if IBM had invested in some really pure research.
Theophylact 04.19.10 at 8:48 pm
That first line should have read, “On the question of when, rather than whether, scientific discoveries will be made, a little personal anecdote:”
Nick 04.19.10 at 8:51 pm
“I can’t get the video to load”
It is on youtube as well if that helps: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_PVI6V6o-4
And I know it is a ‘some guy says’ argument. But it is some guy with some strong academic credentials in science and economics who makes, to my ears, a persuasive argument. Which makes it at least interesting.
roac 04.19.10 at 9:04 pm
In case anyone else read no. 34 and thought “Diesel aircraft engines? Really?”, I will save wear and tear on Google by reporting what I found: There was a lot of interest in diesel before WWII, because it was cheaper and (thought to be) safer. But the power-to-weight ratio turned out to be too low to be competitive. The Soviets had a bomber with diesels during the war, but switched to radials in later models.
Dirigibles mostly ran on diesels, though, including the Hindenburg (Mercedes-Benz).
According to Wiki, there has been a recent revival of interest due to concerns that avgas may be increasingly hard to find. Several companies are messing with it, but it doesn’t look like any of them has a product to sell at this point.
(If the ash problem looked like turning into a long-term one, it would be interesting to see how long it would take to revive the competence necessary to manufacture and maintain large radial engines.)
derrrida derider 04.20.10 at 3:25 am
roac, why radials? Surely precisely because it would be expensive and time-consuming to recover radial technology you’d go for inlines. It’s a much smaller step these days than it was in the 30s to go from common-rail direct injection intercooled turbo diesels for trucks to the same configuration for planes .
Anyway even by WWII the disadvantages of radials (much more air resistance, complexity) often outweighed the advantages (a little more power/weight, much easier cooling), and we’d want our airliners to be fast and reliable.
polyorchnid octopunch 04.20.10 at 3:44 am
Well, I’m no expert, but if the icelandic eruption were to go on for say years instead of days, I think dirigibles would end up being the answer. Heck, I suspect dirigibles may end up being the answer anyway… as I understand, the fuel per passenger mile has the potential to be a tiny fraction of the use in jet travel, and as oil prices climb in the future (as they will… only question is when) dirigibles are probably going to be the only way to make air travel affordable. While it might mean you need to take days to cross the pacific instead of hours, at least people could afford the ticket.
Sebastian 04.20.10 at 4:50 am
“well, there certainly doesnt seem like there’s a market for it NOW, but maybe in 30 or 40 years there will be some unknown level of profitability for biotechnology, so yes, let’s spend several million dollars to fund that robotic deep-sea-vent exploration just on the off chance that we find life down there, which we can use to build an entire industry. the risk is pretty high but the potential ROI is fantastic!”
It is too bad we don’t live in the alternate universe where Bell Labs existed for most of the twentieth century. It would have been useful.
Neil 04.20.10 at 5:18 am
Don’t underestimate the sheer magnitude of human effects on climate. To match our current human CO2 output, it would take about 210 Eyjafjallajökulls erupting continuously.
Walt 04.20.10 at 5:20 am
And does Bell Labs exist now? How much fundamental research does private business fund now?
Neil 04.20.10 at 5:37 am
Completely ad hominem, but I can’t let Nick’s appeal to “some guy with some strong academic credentials in science and economics ” pass without pointing out that the guy is Terence Kealey, chancellor for vice and egregious professor at Buckingham University, and best known in UK academic circles for advising academics’ (who are, of course, all male) to take the following attitude toward their female students: “Enjoy her! She’s a perk”.
Luis 04.20.10 at 5:48 am
It is too bad we don’t live in the alternate universe where Bell Labs existed for most of the twentieth century. It would have been useful.
Ah, yes, the alternate universe where a government-tolerated monopoly used a piddlingly small fraction of its monopoly rents to fund research, until such time when the government decided to actually induce capitalist competition in the monopolist’s primary market, causing the monopolist to promptly stop spending any money on research.
ajay 04.20.10 at 8:30 am
It is too bad we don’t live in the alternate universe where Bell Labs existed for most of the twentieth century.
If you are arguing that private enterprise habitually funds basic research with no short-term applications, you should probably pick an example that is a bit more private-enterprisey than Bell Labs, which was the research arm of a heavily regulated monopoly.
Nick 04.20.10 at 2:48 pm
“And does Bell Labs exist now? How much fundamental research does private business fund now?”
Not enough. The question is how much it would have if there hadn’t been crowding out.
alex 04.20.10 at 3:03 pm
The question is, I guess, whether if all R&D was done as it is in the gee-whiz private-sectory way it is in, say, corporate IT, we’d be happy with a world in which things didn’t actually do what they were supposed to do, pretty much ever.
roac 04.20.10 at 3:12 pm
@43: Dunno, I’m far from an expert, just somebody who happens to have read several books about aviation in the last couple of years. My impression is that the last generation of piston-engined airliners (DC-6, Super Connie) all used radials, and the piston engines in the B-36 were something called the Double Wasp. I assumed that that was because in-lines don’t scale up as well past a certain point. (Though I know the Brits in WWII put Merlins in their heavy bombers.) I await enlightenment.
Alex 04.20.10 at 3:28 pm
I really can’t see any evidence for the idea that piston engines would be more tolerant of the stuff; after all they all have honking great AIR FILTERS in the air intake, which suggests their designers don’t want dust or ashes in the engine, and further that flying through a concentration heavy enough to saturate the filter would be really stupid.
Jakob 04.20.10 at 4:18 pm
Recip engines have (slightly?) lower temperatures in the cylinders than gas turbines do at the hot end, but I’d have thought they still get hot enough to melt the silica particles. The main reason they’d be less susceptible is that they have lower mass flow than jets (which is why air filters are practical,) so wouldn’t suck as much through, but that’s a handwave – it’d all depend on precise particle size and densities.
The short answer with radials v inlines is ‘it depends;’ in the late 1940s radials were the best option for airliners, and because they were the last generation of big recips before the jets came in, they dominated – it wasn’t worth anyone’s while to challenge them. These days most new aircraft pistons these days are liquid-cooled inlines, but if you were going up to airliner sizes and power/weight ratios radials, who knows? You’d have to ask a proper ICE engineer…
ajay 04.20.10 at 4:34 pm
Nick, have you ever heard of the Wellcome Trust? How does that fit into your argument?
bianca steele 04.20.10 at 4:48 pm
alex@49
Good point. Also, they hired Ph.D.’s. They even paid their employees to get Ph.D.’s on company time. They were totally completely an arm of academia.
bianca steele 04.20.10 at 4:54 pm
Not that it matters, but if Europe had their way, none of us would be using TCP/IP (the specifications for which are freely available to anybody, with or without institutional affiliation).
ajay 04.20.10 at 5:03 pm
If government is crowding out private funding for research, then it follows that the constraint is not one of funding, but of researchers.
In other words, there is a limited number of researchers, and they are being paid to research X by governments and are thus unavailable to research Y (putatively a better topic) for private industry.
It’s fairly obvious to anyone in the academic job market that it is not really an environment where a limited supply of talent is being feverishly pursued by many different sources of funding. That would be Premier League football. You can tell the difference: they get paid more.
Nick 04.20.10 at 6:20 pm
“Nick, have you ever heard of the Wellcome Trust?”
How does it not? It is (was?) a private charity that funds scientific research. I am suggesting that there might be more of these kinds of organisations if Government were not taking over many of their functions.
“It’s fairly obvious to anyone in the academic job market that it is not really an environment where a limited supply of talent is being feverishly pursued by many different sources of funding. That would be Premier League football. You can tell the difference: they get paid more.”
The academic job market is highly differentiated. I don’t see decent scientists going hungry by any means, and ones with proven successes can be very well paid either in industry or in academia. As a humanities student, perhaps there is an element of ‘grass is greener’ bias, but my counterparts in the natural sciences seem to have a number of fairly high status/well paying tracks to take.
bianca steele 04.20.10 at 6:43 pm
Well, in industry, at least in engineering, you get ahead, past a certain level, by basically repudiating your profession, your past, your friends, and your values (it’s called the dual-track career path). Then you’re required to find immense insight in Malcolm Gladwell’s more quickly tossed off works. I doubt something similar to that’s the case for most academics or humanities grads.
AntiAlias 04.20.10 at 10:22 pm
Chris @ 9 said:
Aren’t you assuming that there is no way to design an aircraft that can fly in ashy skies? Just off the top of my head I wonder if zeppelins couldn’t do better, for example.
True, I should have said aviation as we know it, i.e. airliners. But why, yes, airships were pretty succesfull in the 1920s-1930s and managed to make very long journeys (Germany-East Africa and back), but nobody was very keen on them after the Hindenburg. I see no reason they couldn’t fly in ashy skies as you suggest (but then I’m no engineer). Had skies been ashy back then, we may be now be flying in somethin out of Sky Captain and laughing at this little volcano. But – now for some speculation – aviation was developed mainly for military purposes in WW1, and yes, zeppelins were decent bombers and scouts back then, but I bet the whole flying thing would have been dropped quite fast if the brass concluded at some point that airships were just as fast/lethal air navigation was going to get.
Who knows, some more impronunciable volcanoes go off, and in a century or so we could be reading about those quaint planes they used to fly in TwenCen when skies were blue…
AntiAlias 04.20.10 at 10:24 pm
Gee, I meant chris @ 29. I blame it on bad fine motor skills.
Peter Erwin 04.21.10 at 9:58 am
… but nobody was very keen on them after the Hindenburg.
Or after the R101, or the USS Akron, or the USS Macon, or any of the other rigid airship crashes of the 1920s-1930s.
By the time of the Hindenburg disaster, Germany was pretty much the only country still trying to use zeppelins.
roac 04.21.10 at 3:43 pm
I tried to do a post like no. 64 earlier, but hit a wrong key, blew it away, and said the hell with it.
What I gather from the Macon and Akron is that lighter-than-air craft are terribly vulnerable to bad weather, and too slow to dodge it. (The R101 is another story; it was rushed into service to meet a political deadline although it was obvious to the knowledgeable that it was not airworthy.)
The future novelist Nevil Shute (Norway) was one of the chief designers of the R101’s “capitalist” competitor, the R100, and wrote a fascinating account in his autobiography. To revert to a pervasive theme, Shute was some kind of libertarian, and his novels make a more attractive case for libertarianism than Atlas Shrugged does. They are also much better as novels — but what isn’t?
AntiAlias 04.21.10 at 6:42 pm
Can’t think of a single example… BTW, I happen to be doing some (admitedly amateurish) research on various topics concerning the 1920s. You tickled my curiosity there – would you say Shute sheds some light on aviation in the era? Any particular book of his that you’d recommend?
chris 04.21.10 at 7:10 pm
What I gather from the Macon and Akron is that lighter-than-air craft are terribly vulnerable to bad weather, and too slow to dodge it.
Did they not have good weather-prediction technology then, or what? (I’m pretty sure they had lightspeed communication, including ground-to-air as well as ground-to-ground.) It’s hard to imagine any modern aircraft claiming that they were ambushed by the weather, even one with the speed of a zeppelin.
Or maybe they just didn’t have any hangars big enough to hold the craft until the storm blows over? That seems like poor advance planning (unless the storm is violent enough to destroy hangar, craft, and all, I guess, but then at least there wouldn’t be anyone on board).
Yeah, I know, 20/20 hindsight. But it seems like a *mature* zeppelin technology would be one that had ways of dealing with a commonplace problem like the weather.
roac 04.21.10 at 7:21 pm
Well, not the ’20s so much. But Shute was an aeronautical engineer by trade — he actually founded a manufacturing company of his own. Most of his novels have some aviation in them and several of them are about it.
You should try and find a copy of No Highway, which looks like a roman a clef about metal fatigue and the disaster that befell the DeHaviland Comet, but it was written several years before the Comet crashes happened. It contains one of the least credible romances ever committed to print, and was made into a movie starring Jimmy Stewart.
Actually, while you learn a lot about aircraft design and flying, I decided the second time I read it that No Highway is about institutional behavior even more than it is about aviation, and that the real hero is not the mad scientist who spots the incipient disaster, but his boss, the narrator, who backs him up against intense pressure at imminent risk to his career, even though he doesn’t really understand the science involved. Shute’s novels are full of heroes who don’t realize they are heroes.
ljdramone 04.22.10 at 6:26 pm
Did they not have good weather-prediction technology then, or what? (I’m pretty sure they had lightspeed communication, including ground-to-air as well as ground-to-ground.) It’s hard to imagine any modern aircraft claiming that they were ambushed by the weather, even one with the speed of a zeppelin.
Today we can directly observe storm systems in real time using Doppler radar and weather satellites, and direct air traffic around the worst weather most of the time.
We have high-speed computers that can model weather to produce forecasts. In the 1930s, not so much. Violent convective activity and associated turbulence (mainly in thunderstorms) is the main hazard for large rigid airships. In the 1930s, weather forecasters could have told dirigible crews there was a chance of thunderstorms in a certan area on a given day, but that’s about it.
As for modern aircraft being ambushed by weather, I give you Air France 447. Last June this Airbus A330 bound from Rio de Janeiro to Paris went down, killing 228, after encountering heavy turbulence in thunderstorms at night over the Atlantic.
lemuel pitkin 04.22.10 at 7:01 pm
Is it really the case that jets cannot fly in the ash? Or is it just — as I suspect — that the risks are somewhat higher than under normal conditions? A central fact about air travel is that for whatever reason, we insist on vastly higher standard for safety than with most other modes. There’s a tendency in these discussions — especially the ones that refer to SF novels — to treat questions like the viability of air travel as purely technological, and ignore the social dimensions.
AntiAlias 04.22.10 at 9:43 pm
Thanks for the tip, roac. Yes, it’s a bit off my historical scope, but I’ll check it out, I’m all for some blue-sky research (no pun intended).
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