Quote:
Originally Posted by WaldoKitty
Indeed.
It was a big waste of money on nothing.
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That's what they all said about airplanes. The Wright brothers were no the first to fly, nor were they the first to build one. They were the first to stick with it until their airplane worked every time like it was supposed to.
It took 13,000 years before a human flew intentionally, using a machine. It took the Wrights 15 years to put humans in the air anytime they wanted to fly.
Change doesn't always happen slowly. The greatest changes often come very quickly.
No one ever knows in the beginnings if the money they commit will be a waste or not. Any entrepreneur will say that.
But without the federal government, we would have none of those Interstates. They all paid for themselves before most of us today were even born.
At the same time, another government project, the nuclear-powered airplane, which was funded during the same time as the Interstates, turned out to be a total waste of money. Not because it couldn't be made- it could- but because using it would have contaminated every flight path with nuclear radiation.
That's the thing about government funding. Some stuff works, some doesn't. Either way, the rest of us eventually profit from both the successes and the failures.
The atomic airplane's funding was stopped because it only seemed like a good idea, but the reality wasn't so good. But that knowledge would have never come if the project had not been funded in the first place. It provided a lot of very useful information about what to avoid in all the nuclear projects that followed, and they were all paid for by government funding as well.
How much is knowing our atomic bombs won't blow us up accidentally worth? Or that the power that your computer burned won't kill you with fall-out from its generation? Both were discovered by the lessons learned from spending money on an airplane that will never be built.
But those same dangers, now understood, could well propel us to another planet one day using the same principles as the airplane. What can work in empty space is different that what works in an atmosphere.
Will that, too, be a waste of money?
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