re: #89 Locker

I don’t think I agree with this statement. The first thing that came to mind is the X Prize Foundation. Innovation can be spurred and encouraged. I think making statements of goal like the moon shot and offering rewards for innovation can focus and encourage people as well as create an atmosphere of progress, which we sorely need.

I know fiscal conservatives don’t like to spend public money on anything but this seems to be something that would contributed directly to the business community.

Just some thoughts.

We already know how to build rockets; there’s nothing particularly new involved in the X Prize entries. The X Prize is simply doing the nudging I spoke of; the really new thing - space flight - has already been figured out. This is similar to automobiles; the IC engine came about on it’s own, without grants or subsidies, and basically sucked for quite a while. At that point, perhaps some government dough might have pushed the improvements along a bit, but they couldn’t have made the idea itself appear simply with wishful thinking. There has to be something there first for such incentives to…incentivize.

I think the government can play a role, for example, in streamlining the approval process for nuclear power plants. Just yesterday I heard a report that Europe is about to begin deploying third generation design nuke plants sometime next year that will be two generations ahead of anything in the US, because it’s been so long since we’ve played in that sandbox. I suspect that our engineering talent could do even better than the Europeans if given the opportunity. But again, this is just nudging along what’s already there.

I suppose one could make a case for wind and solar being incipient power sources needing such nudging. Maybe so, and I’m not opposed to looking into them. But I’ve been following solar for about thirty years now, and there seem to be insuperable problems with it, although it could become a niche power source in specialized applications. Wind, I’m not as familiar with, but it suffers from some of the same problems solar does (it is, in fact, just another form of indirect solar energy) - a large one being relatively low energy density that requires collection over a large area.

So yes, the government or private industry can shove along what’s already out there. To me, though, this doesn’t qualify as innovation, which I see as the discover/development of radically new energy sources, or means of conservation, or recycling and so forth.