PART 3: What is Best for Humanity?

     From Worldometer (new  COVID-19 deaths yesterday):

        DAY  USA  WORLD   Brazil    India    South Africa

June     9    1093     4732         1185       246       82

July    22     1205     7128         1293      1120     572

Aug    12     1504     6556        1242        835     130

Sept     9     1208      6222       1136       1168       82

Oct     21     1225      6849         571        703       85

Nov    25      2304    12025        620        518      118

Dec    30      3880    14748       1224       299      465

Jan     14       4142    15512         1151        189       712              

Feb      3       4005    14265       1209       107      398

          25       2414    10578        1582        119      144

Mar     2        1989      9490       1726       110      194

          31       1115      12301        3950       458       58

April   6         906     11787         4211        631       37

May    4         853     13667         3025     3786      59 

         26         607     12348         2399     3842     101

June    1        287     10637         2346      3205      95

            2        514     10984         2394      2899    110

            9        401     10240         2693      2213    120  

          10        452     14097         2484       6138    127

          15        353       9248         2760      1470    208

Summary:

• India showed quite a decline in new deaths/day.  But let's see what it looks like tomorrow.
• The World and USA also look better.
• Brazil is now the world hotspot with the most new deaths and new cases, 88,992 yesterday.  The U.S. had "only" 12,580 new cases, and is in 6th place.  South America looks terrible.
• Interesting that Russia, the UK and Italy all have around 127,500 total deaths.  But new cases yesterday:
• Russia  14,185 as #5 in the world
• UK  7,673
• Italy  1255
• Japan, with the Summer Olympics a little more than a month away had 838 new cases and 55 deaths yesterday.
• China had 20 new cases and no deaths.

The past two days I focused on the grand challenges of science.  But what should we be doing for the benefit of Humanity?  Should scientists and engineers focus on photographing more Black Holes (Monday, Part 1) or expand hunting for Dark Matter and Energy (Tuesday, Part 2)?  Or should they be funded to end poverty, remediate global warming and engender world peace?

One source says it will take $7 billion to $265 billion/year to end world hunger.  Why the large range?  Experts disagree on how to do this.

What about ending global warming?  Between $300 billion and $50 trillion over the next two decades.  Again, an enormous range.  In both of the above, the true cost will be closer to the higher end, especially as just doing one thing will not be enough:

What about the cost of attaining world peace.  Well, Svenska  Freds, the oldest active peace organization , established in 1883, is using Kickstart with a goal of raising $102 billion.  

The amount donated so far just passed $56,000.  Pacific Standard surmises peace is worth $9.46 trillion.  Again, such a wide range.

In my very first Huffington Post article I argued 13 years ago that if the U.S. reduced our defense budget by 10%, and got all other countries to do the same, after a few years, war would essentially just go away.  I refined the concept three years later (in 2011) with The 10% Simple Solution to Peace.  A whole lot of money goes to war, and if some of this sum can be diverted to positive causes, the world would be so much better.  The USA certainly can afford to initiate this movement:

Where does the U.S. start?

• Our next aircraft carrier will cost at least $12.8 billion.  There are 22 of them plying the oceans, and we already have 11 of them.
• The dysfunctional F-35 fighter will cost $1.6 trillion.
• That's only the beginning.

So to my question on what is best for Humanity?  I would argue that most of those great scientific challenges are worthy of pursuit.  First, that astounding Black Hole accomplishment took only $60 million, $26 million from the National Science Foundation.  The second for Dark Matter is expected to cost around $200 million.  We should continue with those monumental scientific challenges because what they spend is unnoticed noise.  Much of what those astrophysicists do costs less than one-tenth of one percent what it would take to end hunger, reverse global change and get to world peace.

Mind you, I don't think federal funds should be expended on something like getting humans on Mars, which would cost around $1.5 trillion by 2035.  If a few billionaires want to spend their money to get there, fine.  Someday, perhaps an incoming asteroid or our failure to control global warming might serve as reason for escaping to another world.  But not today, and not likely for a long time to come.

Then there is the matter of importance to Humanity and Planet Earth.  How do we benefit from taking a snapshot of our Milky Way Galaxy.  So we confirm the presence of Dark Matter and Energy, how does that help society?  

I got into the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence when I worked at the NASA Ames Research Center because I actually thought that streaming in from advanced civilizations in the Universe might well be the cure for cancer or solution to world peace.  I've always been driven by how there can be some useful benefit.

So what I did instead, as an engineer and not a scientist, was to link the bridge between fundamental information and real world applications:

• Renewable Energy.
• Fusion.
• Hydrogen.
• The Blue Revolution,
• Global Warming, and proposed a 5 cents/pound carbon dioxide credit on petroleum.
• World Peace, and suggested a 10% solution to initiate the effort.

You can click on each to read the details.  For today, let me just mention one, fusion.  Read my HuffPo from a decade ago on Star Power for Humanity.  One report shows fusion energy four times cheaper than nuclear.  To quote First Light Fusion:

Inertial confinement fusion could deliver Levelised Cost Of Energy (LCOE) as low as $25/MWh compared with $50/MWh for onshore wind and $100/MWh for nuclear energy, according to new research published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.

Fusion energy could be the most cost-effective solution for clean baseload power, complementing the need to continue rolling out renewable energy technologies as fast as possible to achieve a zero carbon global energy system by 2050. 

Note that this projection focuses on inertial confinement fusion, a concept I worked on at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.  The ITER effort now ongoing in southern France is magnetic confinement fusion, which I think is fraught with problems.  In any case, when I left the field more than 40 years ago, the laser to accomplish this task had not yet been invented, and commercialization was a generation (30 years) or two away.  Unfortunately, as promising as fusion might be, today, commercialization remains 30 years away.

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