It has been a heady week. On Tuesday January 20, 2009, I received only twelve e-mails from outside our EN-Genius operations. Oh, yes, there was that inauguration thingy going on in Washington, DC…
Barack Obama’s presidency brings us hope for the US. He has inherited so many problems that you have to feel the weight of what needs to be done. So many boils to lance, so many broken relationships to mend, so much help for people who are in trouble – most not being of their own making.
It calls to mind the line from William Goldman's
The Princess Bride where Prince Humperdinck tells his sidekick (torturer and infamous Six-Fingered Man as well) that he won’t come down to the Pit of Despair because: “Tyrone, you know how much I love watching you work; but I’ve got my country’s five hundredth anniversary to plan, my wedding to arrange, my wife to murder, and Guilder to frame for it. I’m swamped.” Yes, President Obama has an economy to fix; a Middle East to bring to peace to; a war in Iraq to end; an Afghanistan to sort out – without falling into the bottomless pits the Soviets did in the late 1970s; a Pakistan to somehow strengthen; an Iran to face down (which is probably going to be fairly easy
because Obama is loved by the young in Iran and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is being marginalized before June 2009 elections); and there are, no doubt, dozens of nuclear threats around the world that may need to be contained.
But, please, don’t forget your promises to science!
At 12:01 on January 20, 2009, the White House website fell into the control of Obama staffers. The updated content contained the first White House blog and the full Obama agenda, including
technology. This is the same stuff from the campaign, and it is very welcome, although we have had no news yet on the appointment of the Chief Technology Officer that was promised.
We know that Obama is hot on creating green technology jobs, but how does he expect to keep the manufacture of solar panels, wind turbines, inverters, transfer switches, etc. in North America? Will the domestic jobs just be installers?
There is so much more out there, so many things in research labs, so many things still in the germinating stages in so many smart brains, so many research accidents waiting to happen. We know that breakthroughs in medical research, for example, rarely happen to those working in the same field. A cure for breast cancer, for example, may well come in the future from someone working on brain tumors, or the like, or something completely unrelated.
And many of us would like to see NASA pulled out from the quasi-military state that it is now in and be clearly made a non-defense agency, one that is there to promote science in space, not strategic positioning or weaponry.
Obama has made clear that he is favor of stem cell research and we hope he throws real money at that work, and very quickly.
The whole arena of health care is one he also wants to tackle, of course, be it a “universal” coverage rather than the deeper issue of medical science. Could it be that his team will see the medical and financial advantages in setting up systems that reduce the needs for surgical intervention because of disease by monitoring health better?
We also need to provide more food in this world of an exponentially expanding population. And we need to do it particularly in countries that are short of that universal necessity: water. Without water we are going to have wars on a scale we have never seen before. And the food we grow needs to be without genetic problems, or taints.
And we certainly do not want to produce crops for fuel; that would be entirely without merit and maybe even more reckless than continuing on a carbon path. We need fuel independence and although wind, tides and the sun can help we also seriously need to consider nuclear options. That doesn’t sound very green, but it may well be our only way forward. We already have a nuclear waste problem, which we will have to solve, and if we put our minds to it we will. Nuclear power at least only adds to an existing problem rather than creating a completely new one.
Climate change is also a challenge that, when we find solutions – rather than just ragging on about reducing emissions – they will be technology that can be exported.
Education is another challenge that must be quickly met. There will be far too few people qualified for good-paying jobs in the future unless education in the US is dramatically improved. We have already wasted eight years with the unfunded teach-to-the-test No Child Left Behind crap. We need to teach children how to learn, how to respect, how to be honest.
And finally, but hardly least, we need to throw technology and money at the electric power grid. The system is already in disarray, using systems and technology that are mostly approaching one hundred years old. A failure of a single power station in the US will, in the not too distant future, take down multiple other power sources and huge parts of the grid.
And then we will have another health crisis as well, with thousands of babies being delivered nine months later…
