This post of Megan’s, which details why calls for “another Manhattan Project” are dumb, is quite good. I’ll go ahead and suggest that calls for “another Apollo Program” are generally even dumber — they’re the same thing, except the speaker doesn’t have enough guts to be willing to bring the A-bomb to mind.
But this got me thinking about the circumstances under which these sorts of projects can work. Here’s my stab at it. These sorts of national greatness problems need:
- … to be primarily an engineering problem.
- … to not contain the words “… and be economically viable”.
- … to have been solved at a smaller scale, or to seem solvable on the basis of some compelling math.
- … to not be about finding a solution to a biological problem, unless that problem can be solved by wiping out a non-microscopic organism.
- … to be undertaken out of concern that another country might get a leg up on us if we don’t succeed.
Obviously this is based on a small set of data points. Basically: we’ve built the atom bomb, gone to the moon, dug a big canal, built a bunch of roads, and run a number of impressive (and impressively expensive) science experiments. We almost certainly could wipe out malaria (almost did!), or develop cellulosic ethanol/Jimmy Carter’s “synthetic oil”, but we either don’t really want to or think it might be a waste of money. And we definitely haven’t cured cancer or AIDS, despite trying pretty hard.
There’ve been more than forty State of the Union speeches since Kennedy said we were moonward-bound, so I’m sure I’m missing at least that many calls for ambitious national initiatives. But this is the basic lay of the land, I think: you’ve got to pick something that seems genuinely urgent, and which is hard but not too hard. It’s simple when you put it that way.
As you might imagine, I’m rooting for China to announce that they’re building a space elevator.
I’ll spare you the detail until I can yell them to your face, but alternative energy research fits perfectly into each and every bullet point you outline above.
I agree! Except, maybe, for the “economically viable” part. Anyway alternative energy is a strange case in that the government clearly shouldn’t be trying to pick winners (see eg GWB’s call for a hydrogen economy), but should be doing *something* — pricing carbon, specifically. So I’d argue that it’s not really a candidate for a Manhattan Project per se, but is ripe for a massive government program.