This statement by Barack Obama appeared on the web today:
In other words, the worse the economy is the more money should be invested into science. Now that’s a political idea I can subscribe to. To bad this is like water off a duck’s back with Stephen Harper. But wait a minute, you say. If the economy has tanked where would you get the money to invest into science (other than printing more bills, which, I have been told, is a bad idea). As it turns out there is a massive cash sink in the US economy – a financial black hole of staggering magnitude. Since 2001 the US has spent well over $1T (that’s 1 trillion one dollar bills) on the lucrative business of war.
While some people might argue that the occasional “well-chosen” war is good for national security it appears that history does not concur with this sentiment. Two wars and hundred of thousands of innocent people later it is obvious to anyone that has their eyes open that the world is not a safer place (on the contrary) and massive amounts of money has been gobbled up by this insatiable beast, money that could have done some much more good. It is difficult to imagine how different the world could have been if this money would have been spent on water purification systems in developing countries, malaria research and prevention, and AIDS research and treatment. Heck, this is probably enough dough to make massive breakthroughs in all those fields.
A while back (2008) Jonathan Eisen of the Tree of Life blog had a compelling post about how much $700 billion (referring to one of the financial bailout packages of the U.S. financial system I presume) would buy in terms of research. In contrast to Jonathan’s research, requiring deep-sea submersibles and other snazzy toys, theoretical research, tends to be on the cheapo side. The key pieces of equipment for a theoretical lab (doing math, stats and computational research) are coffee, paper, pencils and erasers, high performance computer (HPC) infrastructure, and brains. So what exactly could one get with $1T that directly relates to these requirements.
- Coffee. A famous mathematician once said that a mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems. So how much coffee would you get for all the war money? Assuming $15/pound, $1T would get you 71 billion pounds of coffee which is 18 times total world production in one year (based on the total world production of 7,742,675 tonnes in 2007). That’s a lot of math! Caveat: if you get your coffee from Costco you would get 30% more coffee, yearly productions, and do even MORE math!
- HPC infrastructure. Roughly 53 million fully loaded Xserve nodes (at $20210/node). With a total of 107 million CPUs and 856 million cores and more than 32000TB of RAM (i.e. 32 Penta Bytes, that’s a 32 followed by 15 zeros) it will make Jaguar look like a meek kitten (with a measly 224,256 cores and 360TB of RAM). Mental note: remember to set aside a hefty sum for hangar sized building, with nuclear power reactor and a mother of all cooling towers.
- Brains: 24 million post docs (at 45,000/year a pop, or could probably give them a raise), 6.7 million Jonathan Eisen’s (assuming a typical average full professor salary of 150,000/year a head, not in any way implying that Jonathan is ‘just an’ average prof and not taking into account the cost of cloning).
Of course, one could also just focus on writing papers. With the $1T of war money one would comfortably be able to cover the publication fees for 370 million papers in PLoS Biology/Medicine (the two PLoS journals with the highest fees at $2900 per paper).
Another possibility would be for Obama to commit to fund NSF for 144 years (at $7.424 billion/year that NSF request for 2010), or perhaps just increase their annual budget ‘a tad’.
This is from the “Mario’s Entangled Bank” blog (http://pineda-krch.com) of Mario Pineda-Krch, a theoretical biologist at the University of Alberta.
