It seems that barely a month goes
by without someone coming up with some unbelievably expensive challenge that
gets scientists over-excited and governments, who should know better, racing
for their cheque books. To my mind, neither of which should be encouraged.
The latest hair-brained scheme is
for a new aircraft that will fly the Atlantic in an hour. Dubbed ‘The Son of Concorde’
it will be a hybrid aircraft/rocket that has got international high fliers in a
frenzy of anticipation. So, celebrity A-listers will be able to appear live at
a US film premier, fly to the London for the UK launch and still be back in the
US in time to appear live on the Late Show. The fat cats in the city will be
able to enhance their bank balances by trading 24 x 7 on both continents and elite
footballers will now be able to play for 2 clubs at the same time.
Last month it was high speed
trains, the month before that they were looking for volunteers for a one-way
ticket to Mars and before that there was talk of plans to build an even faster
version of the Large Hadron Collider.
Just how many trillions of pounds
are all these schemes going to cost? Is this really what the world is screaming
out for?
Like many commuters I often struggle
to work in traffic that barely reaches 5 mph – will I be any happier knowing
that an aircraft could make the 5000 mile journey from London to New York in
the same time it takes me to negotiate the traffic and pot holes on the
congested streets from my home to my office.
Maybe I should be more excited,
after all it is little over 100 years ago since the Wright brothers first took
to the skies. The wingspan of a 747 aircraft is greater than the distance
covered in that first flight. In the intervening years we have seen supersonic
flight, put a man on the moon and are on the verge of introducing space
tourism. True, the greatest leap forward in rocket science was achieved through
the development of weapons technology during the 2nd world war but
where would we be today without the satellites that are so much a part of our
lives that we take them for granted.
There have been a great many
spin-offs from these flights of fancy in the past and who is to say that future
developments may not bring equally important discoveries.
Having been blessed with the
scientific mind of a goldfish I am probably the last person to be passing
judgement on what is or isn’t feasible. I do however feel that there is a great
deal more that is achievable closer to home without committing such fantastic
sums of money to these projects.
Breakthroughs in medicine are still
coming through which will hopefully reduce or eradicate some of the major
diseases around the world. There are also new products such as graphene that
offer great potential in so many different fields.
Personally, I have never
understood the purpose of the Hadron Collider; firing a laser beam around a
giant tunnel of mirrors under ground, what is that all about? Why did it need
to be the ‘Large’ Hadron Collider? Would a smaller one not have been just as
effective?
Scientists strike me as a pretty
sceptical bunch so I suspect a great number of them will be atheists – why are
they looking for ‘The God Particle’ if they are non-believers? What will they
do if they do find it? How will they know if they have found it? “Oh, that was
nice, now what do we do?” Everyone goes home and CERN is turned into a theme
park attraction.
If we have survived all this time
without ‘The God Particle’ why do we need it now? What are we looking to learn
from it? What are we expected to do with it?
In this topsy-turvy world we live
in I doubt that I will be around long enough to see an end to poverty, a cure
for dementia and alzheimer’s disease, or self-sufficiency in the global food
supply but I might be around long enough to see the maiden flight of ‘Son of
Concorde’.
