Straight from the “You can’t make it up” Department comes news that while Gen Y is aiming for the Moon, Baby Boomers are intent on taking Australia back to the Stone Age. OK, so maybe your correspondent is exaggerating a tad, but read on and draw your own conclusions.
The Saint, being a Baby Boomer (denoting someone born between 1946 and 1963) himself, is somewhat embarrassed by what his generation has bequeathed future generations.
After the dust had settled on the Second World War, things were austere but the future looked bright. Inventions such as nuclear power, antibiotics, plastics and the jet engine promised to make the planet a better place, and abundant cheap oil underwrote the “unlimited” energy to power it all – but still the boomers messed it up. And Gen X (1964 to 1981) has not done much better.
Conflicts such as Vietnam, the first Gulf War, Afghanistan and the Iraqi war, rampant materialism, financial collapse and a planet gasping due to the effects of global warming have served to tarnish what should have been a golden era. While it’s not all been bad - people are better fed, healthier and wealthier than fifty years ago – the older generation do seem to find it difficult to learn from their mistakes.
But the Saint is optimistic than Gen Y (born after 1982) will do a better job as stewards of the planet than their parents. Untainted by the cynicism that comes with middle age, today’s youth are positive, intelligent and ambitious. Thank God, because they’ve got a big mess to clear up.
An example of the diametrically opposed thinking of the boomers and the “echo boomers” (as Gen Y members are sometimes called) comes this past few weeks from the pages of Electronics News.
First up we have the Federal Government, headed by Prime Minister Julia Gillard (born 1961) and Treasurer Wayne Swan (born 1954). In a classic short-sighted move, our politicians are considering cutting tax incentives for research and development by big businesses. Apparently, the move has been prompted by Treasurer Swan’s wish to offer tax relief for loss-making small firms and to use the R&D fund grab to free up the cash.
Swan’s secondary objective is laudable, but surely there are other savings that could be made before taking cash from one sector of industry to fund another. Isn’t that a zero-sum game? How about cutting some of the funding for the ludicrously over-priced NBN. At $43 billion (at the last count) there must be some fat to be cut from that project? Or, better still, stop pumping money into a dying automotive industry and redirect that cash to up-and-coming businesses.
ResMed, the Australian medical company famous for developing devices that manage sleep-disordered breathing, has weighed into the debate. The company notes “it had factored in the tax incentive when it built its R&D department. If the incentive is cut, it will incur increased costs if it continues to develop its products in Australia”.
Like other medical devices and pharmaceutical companies in Australia, ResMed is heavily R&D-focused.
So on top of the carbon tax, the government is planning to load our most export-oriented companies with yet another overhead – hardly the kind of initiative to aid future prosperity.
In sharp contrast, UNSW School of Photovoltaics and Renewable Energy Engineering undergraduate Aaron Bonanno (born c.1992) is heading off to California to present research on powering a future Moon base.
Bonanno – taking the long term view that the future will see men and women regularly leaving near earth orbit - thought up his idea from the perspective of sustainability, so quickly eschewed the idea of transporting heavy and expensive photovoltaic cells, nuclear reactors and fuel cells to Earth’s satellite. Instead the Gen Y student considered ‘In-Situ Resource Utilisation’, or maximising the use of resources already on the Moon.
“My idea is instead of having to transport everything up, you transport a small amount of equipment,” Bonnano told the Sydney Morning Herald. “It reduces the load required, reduces costs and makes the colony on [the] Moon more sustainable because you don’t have to look to Earth for resupply.”
Such is the high credibility of Bonanno’s work that the American Society for Civil Engineers has invited him to explain his research at the Earth and Space 2012 Conference in California.
Elsewhere, Electronics News reports that other bright Australian students are battling it out in a competition to build the smartest autonomous robot.
If this is what our undergraduates can achieve then your correspondent can’t wait until a Gen Y’er leads the country.
To give them due credit, Australian Baby Boomers were once at the forefront of Moon exploration. Scientists at “The Dish” in Parkes were responsible for beaming the highest quality pictures of Neil Armstrong’s famous “small step for [a] man, giant leap for mankind” to an enthralled audience back in July 1969. Other antennas received the signals from the Moon, but they were of such poor quality, NASA preferred the Parkes Observatory’s pictures.
App more valuable than CSIRO’s Wi-Fi
News recently that CSIRO has recently netted another $220 million in licensing for its wireless local area network technology heartened the Saint.
It took years for the research organisation to reap the benefits of its discovery. The breakthrough came in 2009 when CSIRO reached a settlement with the likes of Microsoft, Nintendo, HP, Dell, Toshiba, Asus, D-Link, Netgear and Belkin that gained $205 million in fees. The technology has now made over $430 million.
Canberra is smiling too, because it can grab half of what’s left once the litigation lawyers have taken their share.
But as fantastic a technology that Wi-Fi is – more than 5 billion products incorporating the technology have been shipped – it seems it’s a lot less valuable than an application (or ‘app’ is we’re all now supposed to call these things) that makes your photos look like they were taken in the 1970s.
Instagram, an application for the iPhone and latterly for Android-powered devices has been bought by Facebook for a cool US$1 billion ($967 billion). Users can take snaps on their smartphone and then apply filters to make them look dated or corrupted with lens flare. Apparently the deal, which was financed by 30 per cent cash and 70 per cent shares values Facebook itself at US$75 billion ($72 billion).
Let’s summarise: a small piece of software that makes your photos look worse than before is worth US$1 billion, while a technology that enables computers, tablets and other mobile devices to connect seamlessly to the Internet and enjoy high-speed, interference-free communication is worth $430 million.
And a website that lets people narcissistically share the news of their engagement with ‘friends’ they’ve not seen for a decade is worth more than Boeing (market cap US$47.4 billion ($45.8 billion)), a 96-year old engineering company that’s responsible for some of the world’s most advanced aircraft.
It’s a crazy world.