On 10/4/06, Anna Taylor <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: (...)
From my experience: Innovative creative ideas are in most, rewarding, and at times very financially rewarding.
(...)
Yes, but sometimes you have to put vast amounts of money into a project into a creative idea to actually bring it to reality. And often it is simply too much money to attract investors or even government to the idea. Take for instance drug discovery. Sometimes it takes years of research and millions and millions on lab equipment and scientists to make some advance in some group of medications/substances; and as in any other risk activity, sometimes those efforts end in failure. There is even a provocative book about that, "The $800 Million Pill". Now, imagine that in the future, after we discover many other drugs, the cost for finding even newer ones may be so high that companies will decide that it is higher than the likely return obtained by selling the said newer drugs. And then advances in that field will come to a halt. In fact costs of drug development are already high enough to trigger work on a new field of research, the study of combinations of *existing* drugs, which may have some interesting returns at a far lower cost. Another example: particle physics. In the 90s there was that project for the Supercollider, a particle accelerator that would produce energies high enough to probe the inner workings of matter-energy and, who knows, even Existence itself. (Supposedly the Supercolider would shed some light on the hypothetical Higgs Boson, the so-called "God Particle".) However, it would be vastly expensive to build that and the project was cancelled. Yet another: large scale commercial exploration of space. In the 70's, during the Oil Shock, Gerard O'Neil proposed a massive government project that would build huge solar power stations in space and beam the energy to Earth by using microwaves. The would be cheap energy 24/7, *forever*. (Well, actually for the next few billion years. ;-) Although technically sound and able to pay itself after 10 or 20 years under some reasonable assumptions, the startup investment would be of course enormous, and the project was never implemented. Of course creative breakthroughs are possible. Ideas that were reasonably cheap to develop, like the electric bulb, and discoveries that were basically accidental, like electric induction, changed entirely the whole world. In the same way, one day for instance one may invent antigravity or a cheap space elevator and make commercial exploration dirty cheap. But until then all those "Failed Dreams", as Vernor Vinge called them in "A Deepness in the Sky", will look unattractive from an investment and return point of view. ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
