And until you have the basic research figured out, it's pretty hard to just "entrepreneur" your way through these problems.
There are plenty of people who pursue degrees in the hard sciences --- PhDs in physics, chemistry, etc. Then, somewhere around their third year, they all realize that:
1) To get a faculty job, you have to be beyond brilliant. I'm not. Research labs? Also barely scraping by. Be prepared to, at best, be on soft money and have to apply for grants every 2-3 years, most of which run between a 10-20% acceptance rate.
2) There are some industry labs. They pay decently, but it's basically carrying out others experiments in line with short-term goals. Where can XX find / extract more oil?
Is it any surprise they wake up and shift, particularly to finance IT, where they can at least get paid well? Spend a month learning stochastic calculus and you're good to go. Yes, I oversimplify, but not by too much (at least, for the hard sciences people I've talked with here at the UofC and in the post-graduation Chicago finance shops).
I didn't even have to learn any Stochastic Analysis!
I'm pointing out that of the people who _already_ go into the hard sciences and even get a PhD, we can't keep them in the hard sciences due to a lack of good research jobs for them. So they take an IT job.
, in Silicon Valley.
Believe me, it's a very local cultural thing. If you live there and read HN, which is basically projecting said culture into the world and attracting the few outliers elsewhere who feel the same, it's easy to think that the whole world is like this. It isn't.
Or, at least, where I live, nobody thinks it's cool to be the CEO of the next mobile social local photo sharing startup.
And I still would love to be an astronaut. Just in case someone is hiring around here ;-)
I'd change careers in a blink.
Facebook, Amazon, iTunes, iPads etc etc... all very stupid and superficial when you don't know where your next meal is coming from. But the West will happily preach on to the less developed nations to use inefficient methods of power generation which are still very expensive tech when they themselves have not been able to solve the problems associated with cheaply mass producing power using that same technology.
It's going to be interesting to see how all these technology develops, no doubt at least some of it will filter done to mass produced consumer goods. Hopefully some of the profits will go towards helping the poorer nations develop their tech.