Louisiana Purchase

From our history books, we learned how the USA effectively doubled its size through
the Louisiana Purchase.  From the vantage point of history, the Louisiana Purchase
was a great bargain.  Out of it arose a great nation that now leads the world.

Was the Louisiana Purchase a one time type event that can never happen again?
What if you could get a great bargain like this even today?  What if you can obtain
a means by which the people could benefit from it in ways that are hard to even
imagine?

Louisiana in those times was the frontier.  The new frontier these days is space.
It is being explored today as the Old West was being explored shortly after Columbus.
The Columbus analogy is perhaps not fitting.  Columbus didn't know America was here,
he was just looking for a shortcut to China.  But we knew that space has been there
all along.  Our problem is accessing it.

Perhaps we need the modern day equivalent of the invention of the steam engine.
The steam engine enabled the Old West to be settled and developed.  If all they
had was horses, the Old West might not have been settled at all.  Or if it did get
settled, it would have taken much longer to do it.

What will be the modern day equivalent of the invention of the steam engine?  What
will enable us to settle the new frontier of space?  There are many ideas out there
and I have written about a few of them on this blog.  The future is a tricky thing
though, hard to tell what might happen.

The future is a topic of great interest to me.  Over the years, I have attempted
to predict the future of events- from the outcome of football games, elections, and
the financial markets.  Naturally, I would love to get it right for once!  If only.
I know a little about computers.  Yet I didn't see the potential of investing in
Microsoft when it went public in 1986.  Just a small investment in Microsoft then
could have made me a millionaire.   Alas, I made no such investment and I am not
a millionaire.  The same sad story repeats itself with the invention of the world
wide web.

You get older- maybe if you are lucky- you get a little wiser.  Maybe my ability
to see the future is too weak.  But if I am right about the Bussard Fusion device,
then it will lead to the next big thing.  I'd like to be on the ground floor of
that development, wouldn't you?

It wouldn't take much to get this idea off the ground so to speak.  In the era of
trillion dollar deficits, the cost of building a prototype fusion device is trivial.
I don't have the figure available, but it is around 200 million dollars.  For an
individual or someone in the private sector, this is a lot of money.  But to the
government, it is close to nothing.

So if the government refuses funding for this work, what's next?  Will the private
sector step up to the plate?  Or will it take a lot of individuals willing to join
together in a common purpose to bring this into reality?  Either way, if you willing
to do just a little to help out, it could make the difference.

I guess the old 64k dollar question is this: what will it take?