Rebuttal of Neil Degrasse Tyson: Is Government Needed To Push The Frontier of Science, Technology and Exploration?

Astrophysicist and popular science commentator Neil Degrasse Dyson argues that private enterprises are unwilling to invest in the development of expensive new technologies if the potential market value of that technology is unknown. Therefore, governments need to fund scientific research, especially in areas that have no apparent market value. After the initial research has been made, the commercial benefits would then become apparent, and that is when market forces would come into play.

 

He provides examples to back up his argument. He points out that in the early days of European exploration, it was not private enterprises that explored the New World. It was government-sponsored explorers like Christopher Columbus who set out to claim new land on behalf of the government. Afterwards, Europeans merchants were then able to profit from the discoveries made by the government. He also points out that the internet was created by the military, and that the development of rocket technology was developed and funded entirely by the government for military purposes. Without this initial funding by the government, private enterprises such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, SpaceX, or Google would not exist because these companies have built their business around a technology that only the government would have been willing to develop.

 

I will refute each of these examples and explain why private enterprises are willing to take big risks on new technologies.

 

Discovery of the New World

 

Neil thinks that only governments can discover new continents. Wrong. Asian hunter-gatherers crossed the Bering straight during the Ice Age in search of better hunting grounds. They could have ended up trapped in a frozen tundra and starved to death, yet they took the risk anyway. They didn't need any government funding to take the risk and make the discovery.

 

The first Europeans to discover North America were vikings. The first vikings to explore North America were not funded by kings or any other government. Lief Erikson paid for his own ship and gathered his own crew to go exploring. It was a big risk that paid off. He discovered a new land full of valuable lumber, and a bay teeming with salmon. Viking hunters, lumberjacks and merchants maintained a presence in the New World for up to five hundred years because it was a commercially viable operation. This ended when the natives drove them away once and for all. (It's kinda hard to occupy somebody else's territory and mistreat them if you don't have the unholy powers of the government backing you. So if you're viking merchant operating in the New World, you have a powerful incentive to play nice with the natives or they will drive you out. This is the difference between private enterprise and government-sponsored imperialism).

 

Development of the Internet

 

The US military funded and directed the development of the early stages of the internet. Okay. Who invented the idea of telecommunication in the first place? Who invented the telephone? Who discovered how to generate and transmit electricity? Who built up the electronic infrastructure? Do the names Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, and Nikola Tesla ring any bells? You don't need the government to develop new ideas and new technologies. If the government didn't fund and develop the initial idea of the internet, somebody else would have done it. History is full of geniuses who come up with clever inventions that attract the interest of wealthy entrepreneurs who have the vision and foresight to see the potential of these inventions. Nikola Tesla is one such example.

 

Rocket Technology

 

The father of the modern rocket, Wernher Von Braun, was a rocket enthusiast before he worked for the German government to develop the V2 rocket. The basic idea of a rocket was already well understood at the time. As a young man, Von Braun hung out with a bunch of rocket enthusiasts who designed, built and tested homemade rockets for fun, just like how the Wright brothers designed, built and tested homemade airplanes for fun.

 

Of course, these homemade rockets were small and didn't have any practical use. In order to develop these rockets into the rockets that would eventually launch commercial satellites, Von Braun needed funding from the Nazi government. After Nazi Germany fell, he worked for the American government to develop rockets that could launch nuclear warheads.

 

Is this the price we have to pay for having the government speed up the development of an expensive new technology? People need to die in war? People need to live with the threat of nuclear annihilation?

 

How about we exercise a little patience and wait for an entrepreneur to come along who has enough foresight to see the potential commercial application of rocket technology, and who has enough guts to fund its development? We know from history that such men exist, and we don't even have to look far. Elon Musk didn't have any government contracts lined up for him when he started SpaceX. He didn't get any help from the government to start-up his company. He provided much of the funding out of his own pocket from his sale of Paypal. In fact, he poured everything he had into his company. If he had failed, he would have been left homeless and penniless. It was only after he succeeded did NASA then offer him a contract.

 

My point is that there are visionary entrepreneurs who have the guts to take huge personal risks. A freer society would produce many such entrepreneurs, and this would speed up the rate at which we develop new technologies.

 

 

My message to Neil Degrasse Tyson is this: if you truly want a brighter future where humanity has a strong presence in space, the government is not your friend. In the short-run, the government might develop something useful, but only at a huge cost, not just in dollars but also in the lives lost and destroyed by war. If I had to choose between delaying the Moon landing and not having ballistic nuclear missiles, I would choose to not have ballistic nuclear missiles. Doing something awesome like landing on the Moon is something we can always do later. A nuclear holocaust is forever.