Billions of dollars have been wiped from research budgets, almost 8,000 grants have been cancelled at NIH and the US National Science Foundation alone, and more than 1,000 NIH employees have been fired.
Normal people in the US MASSIVELY underestimate the damage that has been done to the US by destroying science as a career here, it is sickening and to be honest makes it really hard to even want to try to be a part of this shit society in any meaningful way.
The US is racing towards collapse and scientific institutions included but the real collapse story here is the fact that everybody seems resigned to just letting science go away as if it was a fun hobby and not an existentially necessary pillar holding society up and bulwarking our “economic productivity” with new tools, new perspectives and new safeguards to prevent natural catastrophe from robbing us of success.
That is what I will remember most about this time, that the average person in my society sees supporting science with actual money as something akin to getting distracted about sending cool robots to Mars because it is exciting (which is cool and I think we should do it, but a different argument fundamentally then say funding basic vaccine research).
No, many many many of us will die because we have destroyed the funding of science in the US, many are already dying and yet in the midst of this wave of violence try talking to the average USian and they will act like it is a detail that science has been destroyed here, not one of the primary emergencies.
“We have to focus on the economy” US centrists say brushing the blowing out of the keystone piece of the US economy and basic cohesion of systems within it completely out of frame to focus on abstract fabricated ideas like GDP or stocks or some other nearly meaningless factor with respect to our daily lives.
Collapse is many things, but it is always a product of a refusal to listen in favor of orbiting a comforting theology without examining it closely enough to be disappointed.
When people first start looking for gold, they find giant nuggets just sitting there.
Then they use pans, horses and pickaxes to find chunks of gold in rivera and seams in the rock.
Then they build huge floating factories to dredge up entire landscapes and sift for tiny flecks of gold sand.
THEN they gather a massive amount of human slaves to gather host rock and process it with cyanide to leach the gold out of massive amounts of overburden.
At some point whatever new gold is left to go get takes the wealth you already have and lowers it. You will spend more gold mining than you will pull out of the ground. Nobody is saying you can’t go mine new gold today. It’s that it has a negative return on investment. This is beyond the inflection point. Many many things could go into the calculus for what it costs… Your technology, your price of energy, the degree of automation, etc. You might be able to play with your accounting for a long time and find corners of the planet that are favorable…
But to go mine for something that isn’t there and isn’t producing a return make you poor now. In reality / realistic terms this is now different.
So then you end up asking yourself: “what is this gold even for?” And that’s like looking into the abyss because our culture doesn’t have a collective meaning to organize society if this goes away.
Ok, so that’s an analogy. Science used to work, and everything is screaming that we are close to the end now.
Like every government, every company, all our organizations, they all depend on this facade continuing… And so the end of science is extremely damaging to the story we tell ourselves.
If that story were to go away we would have to ask some big questions