A Sputnik for the 21st Century

Having read Thomas Friedman's Op-Ed piece "What's Our Sputnik?" took me back to my own childhood, since I was born a scant two years after the launch of Sputnik. I was raised during the Cold War, when Americans were afraid that any letdown in science education might lead to finding Soviet soldiers on the doorstep at any moment. 

Today, we are much more complacent, in some ways and less so in others. Friedman notes that we are a nation obsessed with "the war on terror", and that we are spending a lot of our intellectual and fiscal capital fighting this "war" (Friedman, 2010).  He believes that this is the current times' "Sputnik", and makes a case that perhaps instead America should be focusing on our competition with China (Friedman, 2010). 

While he makes a good case, I'd like to propose a different "Sputnik" for the 21st century: the development of practical hydrogen fuel cells as an alternative energy source for automobiles. There simply has to be a way to make that work, and think of the energy independence we could gain from foreign oil suppliers. 

Right now, I know that it's "just not possible", but of course no one would have thought we could have made it to the moon by 1969 when that first satellite was launched, now would they? 

Reference

Friedman, T. L. (2010, Jan 17). What's our sputnik? New York Times. Retrieved from     

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