Curiosity Driven Research

With the Curiosity rover’s discovery of an ancient riverbed on Mars last week, there’s been a bit of a backlash about “useless” scientific research.

These detractors say a rock-collecting robot millions of miles away from Earth has no practical value and that all the money going to projects like Curiosity should be sent toward things like medical research.

This nearly always happens whenever NASA does something cool, but it’s got me thinking about how we seriously devalue curiosity-driven scientific research.

The Curiosity rover itself might not find anything that will affect the average person. It probably won’t find a rock that will make your car go faster, and it might not stumble on technology left behind by ancient Martians.

The reason we need to fund research like the Curiosity missions isn’t just what we’ll learn when we get there. It’s what we’ll learn on the way.

As the old saying goes, the journey is the destination.

Take astronomer and engineer John O’Sullivan. He spent years trying to find and measure the radiation given off by black holes only to be beaten to the punch by Steven Hawking.

Sounds like a stupid and pointless venture on O’Sullivan’s end, right?

Well, it depends on your perspective. Sure, the guy didn’t find what he was looking for, but the techniques he used in observing black hole radiation are used internationally and have lead to one of the most profitable inventions to come out of the Internet age.

We know this invention as Wi-Fi.

The list doesn’t stop at O’Sullivan.

Newton had no idea his research would lead to the use of communications satellites.

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, couldn’t have known its research in particle physics would lead to the Positron Emission Tomography, or PET, scanner, saving countless lives.

All of these things and more can attribute their creation to scientists being curious about the world around them.

We can’t possibly know what the next Wi-Fi will be or from where the next revolution in medicine will come.

We can’t even be sure that the Curiosity mission will do anything do advance society.

The only thing we know is that the greatest revolutions in human history have come from scientific curiosity, and to stifle that would only put a cap on how far we as a species can go.

­— kevsjack@indiana.edu