Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries

by Safi Bahcall

For a thousand years, from the middle of the first millennium AD to the middle of the second, China and India dominated the world’s economy. Together, during this period, they averaged just over half of the world’s GDP. The five largest nation-states of Western Europe, by comparison, averaged somewhere between 1 and 2 percent. Paper and printing appeared in China centuries before they appeared in Europe. The magnetic compass, gunpowder, cannons, crankshafts, deep-well drilling, cast iron, paper currency, sophisticated astronomical observatories: China. The imperial civil service exams—over a million tested annually, less than 1 percent passing—had been creating a class of scholar-elites in China for nearly a thousand years before the first universities opened their doors in Europe. Estimates of literacy rates in China around that time range as high as 45 percent. In England, it was close to 6 percent. In the early part of the fifteenth century, the Chinese navy sailed to North Africa and back with the largest fleet and ships ever seen—28,000 men and 300 ships, the largest weighing about 3,100 tons. A few decades later, Christopher Columbus sailed with three small ships, the largest weighing about 100 tons.