To the moon...
What did the cold war have to do with the creation of Silicon Valley. Quite a lot, it turns out.
I recently wrote a post wondering about the factors that led to the creation of Silicon Valley. The presence of Stanford. The role of Stanford’s then dean, Fred Terman. The early startups like Shockley semiconductor and Hewlett-Packard that were a magnet for great talent.
But a big driver of everything was the cold war, and the crazy amount of money the US Government pumped into research in pursuit of the defense and space programs. Surprisingly (to me at least), Lockheed had a large setup at the Stanford campus, where they did cutting edge research. Where did they get the money to do this? The US Department of Defense. Who were the early customers of Hewlett-Packard? Defense manufacturers.
The entire spending on the US defense and space program had a salutary effect on the development of technologies and, perhaps more importantly, the talent pool that would later build silicon valley. One could draw a straight line from those days to America’s dominance today in the technology sphere. And the incredible wealth they have created.
It is not as if the US did not have more pressing social problems then. Perhaps you could point to the prevalent racism. Or I’m pretty sure at poverty in the interiors of the country. Was that a reason to not invest in the space program? Very far from it.
The pursuit of seemingly irrelevant science programs creates ripples and second order effects that can compound into incredible outcomes. And as Steve Jobs famously said in a different context - you can only connect the dots looking backward.
So what about Chandrayaan 3? Is that a program India should have pursued given its crushing poverty? You know where I stand, and why.