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Published online 5 June 2008 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2008.871
Column: Muse
Going to the Moon in a bubble
A paper likening the Apollo missions to the dotcom boom raises interesting questions about how society makes technological leaps, says Philip Ball.
It’s perplexing that the US space agency NASA seems about to focus immense resources and effort on repeating its achievement of four decades ago. If, as the current president intends, NASA manages to put another person on the Moon by 2020, this will have involved a longer gestation than the Apollo missions (counting that from John F.
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The authors are to be thanked for making this paper available on Arvix. It is a much appreciated analysis. The concluding questions are worthy of further consideration: "Is it possible that nascent, emerging industries need “animal spirits†and over-investment for innovation? Or is it more that bubbles serve mainly to change the wealth dynamics of society, and through this mechanism affect the investment process?" I suspect that it is the former, and that the latter is a happy consequence. The obvious pragmatics are that sustainable efforts require the product to bring significant benefits; if those benefits are indeed the transformation of social order so that the species is better able to survive environmental changes, then I have no doubt that the positive view of the bubbles hold solely upon evolutionary grounds. What leads to inevitable periods of extraordinary enthusiasm and risk is therefore an interesting subject for study but suspect they are opportunistic and impossible to artificially produce. We will inevitably see these bubbles when there exists the promise of extraordinary social transformation. The push to space, and the rapid interaction enabled by the Internet, offered exciting promises, and it is that "promise" that drives such movement. If that promise enables members of our species to make contributions that are widely recognized, advancing the social collateral holdings of the individuals involved, then those members will take risks that more risk adverse members of the species will not. Hence you have an evolutionary force, that is happily driven by social transformation.