Sputnik: Revolutionizing the World for the Better

Imagine this, it is October 3, 1957, the heart of the cold war. The United States is in the

middle of a nuclear arms race, and tensions are high between the US and Russia. October 4th

arrives, and the world goes into complete panic. Russia has just launched a satellite into low

earth orbit, a satellite named Sputnik.

Sputnik brought the world to a sense of panic. The United States had already

experienced two failures to launch things into orbit, and when we realized that the Russians were

ahead of us technology wise, we realized something needed to be changed. Within half a year,

Congress passed the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) that invested more than $153

million into the United States education system. By the nineteen-sixties, though, the funding had

increased six-fold.

One of the most important results of the Sputnik scare was the creation of the National

Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The National Advisory Committee for

Aeronautics (NACA) was the predecessor to NASA, and it became NASA when Eisenhower

(the President at the time) signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act on July 29, 1958.

Since its creation, NASA has inspired millions of people, young and old. For example, when

Kennedy charged the nation to send a man to the moon, the United States was able to pull it off

in six years. Many children today still have the dream of being astronauts and going into space,

going into space and conquering the final frontier.

The most important result of the Sputnik scare was the creation of the Advanced

Research Projects Agency (ARPA). ARPA, later DARPA, was founded to create high-level
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Research and Development projects. In 1969, ARPANET was created. This was the first ever

packet-switching network. In simple terms, this was the first ever “internet.” The internet can

be considered the single greatest invention of today. Think about it, can you imagine a world

without internet? The internet even ten years ago is no comparison of what it is today, and

without the Russian’s launch of Sputnik, the internet would not be nearly as developed as it is

today.

The Sputnik of today is the fact that we do not have a solution to the global energy crisis.

We are currently using energy at an over-excessive rate, and need to bring that down. As of

today, we do not have the technology to solve the need for energy drain that the United States

itself creates, let alone the world. Our generation is faced with the challenge of fixing the

supposedly irreparable damage that previous generations have already inflicted on our home,

planet Earth. Just as the youth of the nation during the cold war had to come up with a solution

to the challenge that Russia placed in front of us, we will have to create solutions to the energy

crisis that we face. Just as Eisenhower created many new programs, Obama is passing multiple

new initiatives that are funding the “green revolution.”

In the future, we will look back fondly on our green revolution, though we will be

shocked at how long it took us to start thinking about it. Expect to see electric cars all around and

well supported by the government. Today, many companies will subsidize electric cars, for

example, Google has stations where their employees can charge their electric cars from the solar

panels that act as shade structures. Even within 20 years, it is completely feasible for all

companies to participate in this form of solar project.

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 The energy deficit we currently face will be just as sputnik was a catalyst. It will get the

ball rolling for millions of new technologies.

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