Blue skies research is scientific research where “real-world” applications are not immediately apparent. For example: Does the Higgs Boson exist? What happens to a spaceship when it goes through a black hole?
Amidst the pandemic, many questions arose about the whereabouts of state funds. Many complained about “useless” and “unnecessary” sectors. They suggest that those funds would be better relocated toward more certain sectors, such as wildlife protection, employment of people, food and water for third world countries, among others: those that have a tangible effect because resources are scarce.
The government’s aims should center around their citizens and blue skies research simply does not fit into this category. It’s still a hunch that is yet to be proven.
Why is this problematic?
- It takes up a huge opportunity cost to do countless amounts of research and testing of many hypotheses until they reach a breakthrough. This is the exclusive nature of blue-sky research: you will have to try until you succeed in a way, failing in the middle of the way will be perceived as a waste of resources. There is no guarantee that it will reach a breakthrough. For example, NASA’s yearly budget for 2020 is $22.6 billion, the Large Hadron Collider costs around $5 billion, and a $1 billion annual operation cost. In the end, less than 1% of Large Hadron Collider data ever gets looked at.
- Even if it reaches some kind of breakthrough, it is usually still in the form of a theory or prototype. It needs more time and resources for that particular theory to be useful for the people on the ground because many technologies and inventions are only useful in laboratory conditions and can’t be mass-produced. Examples of these are gravitational manipulation, genome editing, and space habitation.
- Even then, will it benefit everyone? Many ideas are useful only for a limited scope of people. Space exploration, for example, is currently only limited to those who can afford to buy the ticket. New biological breakthroughs will most likely only be useful for those who can afford such treatment.
The only time when the governments ought to step in is when blue-sky companies can provide immediate applicability. That is when the government can take over the issue of scaling and operationalizing it to the public.
The exclusive nature of private companies conducting blue-sky research is that they can quickly utilise the breakthrough themselves and the excess of wealth gained from the research such as patents and quick commercialisation that profits corporations.
The government can only step in when there is a tangible result because it has a direct responsibility to its people. Furthermore, it causes speculation that creates distrust for the government on things such as corruption, because the result of this kind of research is intangible and the term of success for this research is ambiguous by nature.
Then why should the government focus on applied research?
- There are more urgent problems in the status quo. Thousands are starving because of the lack of food, problems with clean water, environmental problems, and the extinction of animals.
Before going into the future, these problems must be solved first. We already have clean water desalination plants which can be brought further if we focus on those areas instead of something uncertain.
- Current human lives are far more important. The problems of the future ought to be deprioritized, especially when the people right now are the ones paying taxes and expecting an immediate return on them.
- The government is the only actor that can do this. Most private companies wouldn’t want to invest in applied science, given that they gain no profit from helping wildlife, giving out free clean water, or alleviating homelessness
- Many important inventions were part of applied research, such as the internet, which was first funded by the U.S. Department of Defense. So, world-changing inventions are not limited to blue-sky research, but also toward applied research.
- By the time we have already improved our current technology, new problems will surely arise. These are the problems that we once issued as a hunch and irrelevant but we now issue as relevant and fall under the category of applied research. For example, if we can reduce the mortality rate, then the issue of overpopulation arises, thus we need to find a new exoplanet. If we can solve the clean water problem, later on, the issue of limited water becomes urgent and we need to focus on synthetical water research. If we focus on improving our space technology including but not limited to spaceships and satellites, later on, we are bound to be able to traverse the stars, then the issue of black holes becomes a problem, and so on.
When a private company invests in blue-sky research and they reach a practical breakthrough, two things can happen:
- If it is profitable, they scale it up, make the manufacturing process cheaper, buy the raw products in a big number, etc. This means that all the benefits of blue-sky research are still attained. There is no need for the government to step in because private companies do it anyway. There is no need for the government to invest in the researching process of smartphones because private companies can do it on their own.
- If it is unprofitable, that breakthrough can still be accessed by the public in the form of journals, and if it is useful but not profitable, then the government can step in and make the application useful. For example, the technologies used by NASA are funded by the US government such as DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) and CO2 conversion on space.
What if the government invests in blue sky research?
- When it reaches a breakthrough, it can be taken away by private companies simply because private companies can manufacture it better and faster than the governments. If this happens, it will be a waste of resources and the economy for the government. This is harmful because the opportunity cost that can be used to give a living to the poor is instead directed to substitute the research cost of a private company’s future product.
- Even if the government can scale up and manufacture these products, to what extent will it succeed? Because currently, it has already been strained by the cost of researching ideas and now it also has to cater to manufacturing those products with little to no profit simply because they lose in market competition.
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- This House believes that humanity should invest a considerable amount of resources into the exploration of deep space (e.g. colonising, space mining, exploring deep space, finding alien races)
- This House believes that state funding for scientific projects should never go towards blue-skies research*
Further reading
The information in this article is a compilation of several sources, which are listed below. We recommend you read them for further understanding of the topic.
https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/how-blue-sky-research-shapes-the-future
https://www.nasa.gov/planetarydefense/dart
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/23/opinion/particle-physics-large-hadron-collider.html