Mark Shuttleworth, a South African Internet tycoon who paid tens of millions of dollars to go to the International Space Station aboard a Russian Soyuz craft, recounts his arrival in space--blinking, wondering, and weightless after the fire, shaking, and acceleration of liftoff--in Adam Fisher's oral history of space ­tourism ("'Very Stunning, Very Space, and Very Cool'"):

The thing I remember as being quite striking was this collection of very domestic sounds that kicks in after the main-engine cutoff. Mechanical sounds, like the air circulation and the conditioning, and then bits and pieces are kind of kicking in. You've got alarm clocks and fans, and you've got a big device called the "globus." It's a ball--your map, basically--that turns, and it starts going tick, tick, tick, like a cuckoo clock. You've just gone through this extraordinary experience of getting into space, and then suddenly it's like waking up inside the workshop of an old Swiss clockmaker or something. So it's this amazing contrast between what you might expect--which should involve special effects and background music--and the very mechanical physical reality of it.

Thus, even the most transcendental of real, human experiences (which Saul Bellow, in Mr. Sammler's Planet, evoked, wonderfully: "To blow this great blue, white, green planet or to be blown from it") occurs amid the most mundane technology.

That technology can be very old. The space tourist Charles Simonyi, a former Microsoft executive responsible for Word and Excel, whom we profiled two years ago ("Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Meta," January/February 2007), describes the optical sight on the Soyuz: "It's like a very old-fashioned--I don't know what it is. There is nothing, no items like that anymore. ... That instrument could have been constructed in the 19th century."

Famously, the Russian space program employs a brutalist approach: its engineers use the crudest, oldest technology that works. (Since the first Soyuz flew in 1966, only those parts that have failed or are obviously obsolete have been redesigned.) But the technology aboard the space station, much of which was constructed by the U.S. and European space agencies as well as the Russian, is only a little shinier. ­Simonyi says, "The space station is so messy. Words don't do justice. It's like going into the messiest hardware store you have ever seen."

Because they are professional futurists, technologists like to contemplate new, bright, and disruptive technologies. Often, by a process of substitution, they talk about the newest iterations of things as if they were the only things people actually use. But our spaceships disclose a universal truth: old technologies are seldom abandoned, and only when they are intolerably inconvenient. (The former financial analyst Pip Coburn calls the moment when a "perceived crisis" is worse than the "perceived pain of adoption" of a new technology the "Change Function"; see "Who's Sorry Now?", May/June 2006.) Mainly, however, old technologies accumulate like geological strata, changing under the pressure of new circumstances.

The writer Robert X. Cringely has succinctly expressed this idea in one of his "laws of computing": "Old software never dies; it just gets upgraded." In "Parallel Universe", Cringely explains how multicore computing--the use of many micro­processors on a microchip--can multiply processing power without increasing the heat associated with ever-greater minia­turization. Cringely writes that in order to solve some of the problems of parallelism (or how software is torn apart so that a process can be run in parallel on hundreds of processors), Intel has recalled to service "some graybeards of 1980s super­computing." For these graybeards, parallelism never disappeared. Now, in order to preserve Moore's Law, we will use technologies first developed to build nuclear bombs during the Cold War.

Or consider the U.S. electrical grid. In our cover story, "Lifeline for Renewable Power", our chief correspondent, David Talbot, writes, "A patchwork system has developed. ... But while its size and complexity have grown immensely, the grid's basic structure has changed little since Thomas Edison switched on a distribution system serving 59 customers in lower Manhattan in 1882." Talbot shows that the old grid, constructed to transmit the predictable flow of electricity from the burning of fossil fuels, must be upgraded if it is to accommodate more-variable, renewable energy sources like wind and solar power.

As much as they are a deepening coastal shelf beneath our technological civilization, old technologies also live in each of us. Biologically, we are their creatures. Exploring how archaeo­genetics, the application of genetic analysis to the study of prehistory, might explain the puzzle of how we came to be highly civilized creatures (see "Our Past Within Us"), Mark Williams argues that we evolved through our technology. "Humankind invented agriculture, started eating different foods, and began dwelling in cities; populations expanded, allowing large numbers of mutations. Natural selection promoted the spread of beneficial variations." Among those traits selected, Williams suggests, were those that allowed us, eventually, to build spacecraft and space stations. But write to me and tell me what you think at jason.pontin@technologyreview.com.

Like snowflakes upon a sea, and as little regarded, are letters to a new president.

Frustrated former presidents, fretfully retired statesmen, and senators ambitious to sit in your cabinet want you to enjoy their wisdom. Ordinary citizens take to their keyboards, as befits a democracy. Captains of industry, those proud alumni of the Polytechnic of Life, are determined to level with you. Even intellectuals--scientists, economists, and, Someone forgive us, magazine editors--feel the solemn duty to buttonhole you about what you must do in the first months of your administration.

Wired magazine devoted its October issue to "a Smart List of 15 Wired people with big ideas about how to fix the things that need fixing." More selectively, we have asked three éminences of science and technology to advise you. (Letters from Ernest Moniz, the director of the MIT Energy Initiative; John Halamka, the chief information officer of Harvard Medical School; and Charles Vest, MIT president emeritus.) All try to make action urgent and its nature clear.

As will I. Whoever you are, you will have pressing demands upon your attention. As I write in mid-October, a burst financial bubble appears to be leading to a global crisis of liquidity. You must fight two protracted wars. The very weather frightens. And at home and abroad there is a general malaise about the American project: to many, the United States, which Ronald Reagan, echoing Lincoln, often called "the last, best hope of man on earth," seems to have become one of the ordinary nations.

The promotion of science and technology must feel very far from your priorities. But encouraging America's scientists and technologists is essential to the well-being of your fellow citizens and (insofar as the United States has been the world's wellspring of research and development) of everyone alive.

It was so before. In the 20th century, U.S. achievement in science, engineering, and medicine "protected our nation's security, fueled most of our economic growth, and nearly doubled our life span," Chuck Vest writes. "It sent us to the moon, fed the planet, brought world events into our living rooms, established instant worldwide communications, gave rise to ubiquitous new forms of art and entertainment, uncovered the workings of our natural world, and gave us freedom of travel by air, sea, and land."

Science and technology may astonish the 21st century, and they can help solve many of the problems you face; but they will flourish only if the federal government funds long-term discovery research. Venture capitalists and entrepreneurs will develop the most commercial discoveries; but the discoveries are the fruit of research for which there is no sure application.

Your predecessor hardly cared for such stuff. Over the last eight years, most federal funding of research was reduced or maintained at the same level (and therefore declined after inflation). Only one area of research really prospered: science and technology with applications in security and defense. Generally, U.S science and technology is suffering.

Consider, for example, research into alternative energy. In testimony before the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming in September, MIT's president, Susan Hockfield, told legislators that in 1980, 10 percent of federal research dollars went to energy. In 2006, she said, it was less than 3 percent: between $2.4 and $3.4 billion, or less than half the annual R&D budget of the largest North American pharmaceutical company. Hockfield called for Congress to begin by tripling funding for energy research.

You should champion such increases. In the cover story of this issue (see "Sun + Water = Fuel"), Kevin Bullis shows why. He describes a catalyst developed by Daniel Nocera, a professor of chemistry at MIT, that generates oxygen from water, much as plants do during photosynthesis. Bullis writes, "The reaction is the first and most difficult step in splitting water to make hydrogen gas. And that advance, Nocera believes, will help surmount one of the main obstacles preventing solar power from becoming a dominant source of electricity: there's no cost-­effective way to store the energy collected by solar panels."

This is a tremendous advance: if artificial photosynthesis works at a larger scale, we have clean power. Nocera's ­current research is part of a $21.5 million program, funded by the National Science Foundation, that will continue until August 2013. But Nocera has been working on artificial photosynthesis since the early 1980s, and it will take another decade to commercialize his work. If we judge by recent emerging energy technologies, that commercialization will demand hundreds of millions of dollars more. Until venture capitalists have been convinced of the technology's promise (and potentially for longer, if the financial markets cannot offer an exit strategy to justify VCs' investment), much of that money must come from the federal government.

Mr. President, please work with Congress to increase research funding. Science and technology can expand human possibilities, but only when they are themselves expansive.