Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD
over, still spends, when all costs are tallied, well over $300 billion
a year. (And elsewhere in government there are many programmes
that amount to welfare for the well-to-do.) Perhaps our
descendants will look back on our time and marvel at us,
possessed of the technology to detect other beings, but closing our
ears because we insisted on spending the national wealth to
protect us from an enemy that no longer exists.*
David Goodstein, a physicist at Cal Tech, notes that science has
been growing nearly exponentially for centuries and that it cannot
continue such growth, because then everybody on the planet
would have to be a scientist, and then the growth would have to
stop. He speculates that for this reason, and not because of any
fundamental disaffection from science, the growth in funding of
science has slowed measurably in the last few decades.
Nevertheless, I'm worried about how research funds are distributed.
I'm worried that cancelling government funds for SETI is
part of a trend. The government has been pressuring the National
Science Foundation to move away from basic scientific research
and to support technology, engineering, applications. Congress is
suggesting doing away with the US Geological Survey, and
slashing support for study of the Earth's fragile environment.
NASA support for research and analysis of data already obtained
is increasingly constrained. Many young scientists are not only
unable to find grants to support their research; they are unable to
find jobs.
Industrial research and development funded by American companies
has slowed across the board in recent years. Government
funding for research and development has declined in the same
period. (Only military research and development increased in the
decade of the 1980s.) In annual expenditures, Japan is now the
world's leading investor in civilian research and development. In
such fields as computers, telecommunications equipment, aerospace,
machine tools, robotics, and scientific precision equipment,
the US share of global exports has been declining, while the
Japanese share has been increasing. In that same period the
* The SETI programme was briefly resurrected, using $7 million in private
contributions, in 1995 under the appropriate name Project Phoenix.
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