You're not "paying them to make progress" - You're paying them to do science. Sometimes people's ideas just don't tally with how reality really works - it's stupid to blame a scientist who points out that there's a flaw in some idea that was never proven to work in the first place.
But science really paid off in a big way around the first half of the 20th century, it put that car in their driveway, it put a refrigerator in their kitchen, it made air travel a reality and the world a smaller place where one part of it can always be in almost instanteneous contact with another part, thats how it was in 1950, and now 56 years later, we still see that car in the driveway, that refrigerator in the kitchen and people still fly around in airplanes taking about the same time as they did in the 1950s. People in the 1950s thought that the scientists were doing a wonderful job improving their lives with all these inventions, but in 2006 people wonder what have these scientists done for them lately. Lately they've been coming up with esoteric facts, making their encyclopedias just a little bit larger, these new facts seem to have little to do with improving their lives, they seem interesting for those scientists that work in those fields, but no broader applications seem to develop from them that can apply to society as a whole. Its kind of like the difference between a spinning toy for an ancient greek philosopher and an actual steam engine that does useful work. The Ancient Greeks had an age of science too, they investigated alot of things, but what did these ancient Greek Philosophers actually do for the societies they lived in? Did they actually improve the lives of the average Greek citizen? No, the wrote books and educated themselves, learned that the world was round through their scientific measurements and then they quietly filed their papers away in the library of Alexandria, only to be burned centuries later by the Romans. A fat lot of good all that scientific investigation did the classical world. Technological progress was very slow through much of human history, and then it quickly accelerated at the end of the 18th century with the development of steam power, electricity in the 19th century, the development of the automobile, radio communication and flying machines in the 20th century, and for some reason, scientists and their investigations did not produce the substantial returns that they used to after 1950. What was the reason for this sudden technological explosion? Why should it have occured then and not later or earlier, and what was the reason for its sudden slowdown? One wonders if we've entered a new age of slower technological progress similar to the once that preceded the technological explosion at the end of the 18th century. Are we facing further millenia of the automobile, the airplane, and radio. Are we going to burn down our entire fossil fuel reserve, turn the Earth into a Venusian greenhouse with greenhouse gases because our scientists and engineers cannot come up with better alternatives?
Maybe further discoveries are harder for scientists to make than their predecessors, but all the public sees is the bottom line, they see money going into these scientific enterprises, but they also see the returns they get out of it getting smaller. That same old car, not all that different from Henry Ford's model T is still sitting in their driveway, they still have to wait in traffic as they commute to work in the city while big jumbo jets fly overhead. No flying cars to get them to work faster, they see some on television, they even seen a prototype flying at the end of a tether, the Mollier Skycar, but that was 10 years ago, their neighbor still hasn't gotten one, we still drive those ground cars and sit in traffic fuming.
I think there has been something of a disconnect between science and progress. The scientists continue their investigations, but they are no longer making the progress they once had. I'm not blaming the scientists for this. I just want you to see why the public doesn't have as much faith in science as they once had, and why they turn to things like religion.
The secularists fight religion, saying its superstition and the like, but they had a stronger case to make for science in the 1950s than they do now. People only see the bottom line, they don't know the reasons why, they evaluate things by the returns they get.
There was an article in the New Scientist recently about ITER, some politicians prediciting break even by 2050, while other scientists make a more gloomy assessement of it taking 100 years. The article continued to say that nuclear fusion still ought to be funded due to the benefits it would bring 100 years in the future.
If nuclear fusion is so hard, yet the hydrogen bomb, an invention of the 1950s, is so easy Wouldn't it be easier to harness the power of a hydrogen bomb than to produce controllable small scale nuclear fusion over the next 100 years. The engineering tasks of building such a huge container which can contain a thermonuclear explosion would be formidable indeed, but this is the science of producing large structures. In 100 years we can produce the modern equivalents of the Great Pyramids of of the ancient world. If we can build something large enough that can contain that nuclear explosion we'd be set as opposed to 100 years of uncertainty of maybe were making progress in nuclear fusion and maybe not.
Perhaps what we need to get into space is large scale engineering rather than scientific breakthroughs or technological inventions. The invention engine has broken down and the public is faced with the choice of either building massive engineering works with existing technology or of using that money to fund new research and making a new entry in scientific journals at great public expense. That is the point I'm trying to make.
Now, back to a space elevator. Malenfant, you know something about orbital mechanics, right? What would happen to a space station in geo-synch orbit as it began to lower a massive cable to the Earth's surface? What would happen to the cable?
