The plasma in the center of this fusion reactor is so hot it doesn’t emit light; it’s only the cooler plasma located at the walls that can be seen. Hints of magnetic interplay between the hot and cold plasmas can be seen. Image credit: National Fusion Research Institute, Korea.

5 Incredible Advances Science Could Buy With The Government’s $600B Military Budget

For just a year’s worth of US Military budget, we could transform the world.

The United States spends more on military spending than the next ten nations combined: an estimated $600 billion annually. Meanwhile, the entire budgets of NASA and the National Science Foundation, combined, is only ~$25 billion, or about 4% of our military budget. Many astronomers, astrophysicists, engineers, and scientists of all persuasions dream of the benefits that mild increases to their budgets could bring, but these are tiny, incremental dreams.

What if we truly reached for the stars? What if we dreamed of a day where we invested in peaceful research for the betterment of humanity as much as we invested in war, defense, and the military? If our space and science budgets went up to $600 billion, either in lieu of or in addition to whatever we spent on the military, what we could accomplish would be tremendous. Here are five possibilities of what we could do with just a single year’s worth of military-level spending.

A fusion device based on magnetically confined plasma. Hot fusion is scientifically valid, but has not yet been practically achieved to reach the ‘breakeven’ point. Image credit: PPPL management, Princeton University, the Department of Energy, from the FIRE project.