Hacker News Reader

Comment by nimos | Hacker News Reader

The greatest travesty in the world right now is there doesn't exist a multi-government 10xManhattan sized project to develop a really really good battery.

It would enable a huge reduction in CO2 emissions(bye gasoline), allow developing countries have stable electrical sources and low cost renewable distributed generation, cut costs(good includes cheap), and enable renewable energy sources to make up a larger mix of our energy production.

Always exciting read about new developments, wish I knew more about chemistry/physics, hopefully we get there sometime soon!

View on HN

People don't have great ideas on what they'd do with new monies that would come a 10xManhattan size project. Tesla, VW, Toyota, Dept of Energy, DARPA, NSF, Energy Companies, Industrial Conglomerates like GE, Panasonic, etc. all work on battery research. (& many more)

The actual Manhattan project could spend the funds by building reactors with desirable end-products (uranium etc.) and building a lot of centrifuges to refine it further - along with engineering teams to design, build, and operate these things, various bomb and delivery mechanisms etc. It was the very beginnings of nuclear science, so there were many fundamental ideas to be discovered and tested out - it meant sense to spend a lot of money to travel and explore this newly discovered branch of the tree of knowledge.

Efforts are underway. Unfortunately, it's a tedious slog.

There's a book by Steve LeVine, The Powerhouse, that describes the current environment of battery research and some of the main players (Argonne national lab, DoE, Startups, Korea, Japan, etc.). (It features Goodenough.)

Governments cannot invent or develop technology, they only hinder it.

.. and yet here you are using the internet.

Some entrepreneur or company in silicon valley would have invented stg better and cheaper.

Silicon Valley itself wouldn't have existed in the form it does without the huge government investments in the area, so even if that happened - and you can speculate all you want but facts remain they didn't -, it'd still be a win for government R&D funding.

.. said literally in reply to a comment about the Manhattan project.

GP's post is oversimplistic, but I think there's something there. Maybe it's better stated as, "Governments tend toward invention of things that, in the long term, are destructive and divisive rather than peaceful and collaborative."

If "technology" is defined (or construed) to more closely follow successful human evolution (which I think is reasonable), then weapons of mass destructive are a differently (albeit obviously related) phenomenon and not "technology."

It depends on how you view the age-old political question of means and ends. If the latter grows out of the former, and if governments, as monopoly-holders on initiation of violence, use force as their means, then naturally we can expect things that come from government to grow toward those ends.

A comment made on the Internet...

Actually, you could not be more wrong. If you read The Entrepreneurial State from Mariana Mazzucato[1]. It argues that most inventions are coming from public funding. Companies are the ones that customize to the users need and then monetize it.

[1] https://www.demos.co.uk/files/Entrepreneurial_State_-_web.pd...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com