Plan beats no plan. And in The Martian, Red Planet-marooned astronaut Mark Watney (played by Matt Damon) devises a pretty simple one, though hardly an easy one: “In the face of overwhelming odds, I’m left with only one option. I’m gonna have to science the s— out of this.”

To that quote, my brain always adds a parenthetical, “Because that’s what Americans do.” Scientific discovery and entrepreneurial application are the key drivers of human progress. And Americans like to think that no one is better at those things than we are. The United States leads the world in pushing forward the technological frontier. No nation has won more Nobel prizes in the sciences. No nation has better technology companies or universities.

And naturally all of us are hoping our smartest scientists and technologists can “science the s—” out of the global COVID-19 pandemic. Economic shutdowns can’t last forever. Any road map toward a return to normalcy includes better testing, tracking, therapeutics, and eventually a vaccine.

But so far, the world’s technological leader has lagged in dealing with COVID-19. We need to be much better going forward if we are to end this pandemic ASAP and better tackle the next one. As entrepreneur and tech history blogger Jason Crawford writes in a fantastic little essay for Leapsmag:

The new coronavirus should not defeat our spirit—if anything, it should spur us to redouble our efforts, both in the science and technology of medicine, and more broadly in the advance of industry. Because the best way to protect ourselves against future disasters is more progress, faster. … In fact, the more worried we are about future crises, the more energetically we should accelerate science, technology and industry. In this sense, we have grown complacent. We take the modern world for granted, so much so that some question whether further progress is even still needed. The new virus proves how much we do need it, and how far we still have to go. Imagine how different things would be if we had broad-spectrum antiviral drugs, or a way to enhance the immune system to react faster to infection, or a way to detect infection even before symptoms appear. These technologies may seem to belong to a Star Trek future—but so, at one time, did cell phones.

And this is no time to make modernity and progress for granted. We have to work at it, even harder than before. In the paper “Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?” economists Nicholas Bloom, Charles Jones, John Van Reenen, and Michael Webb document how finding big, game-changing ideas and putting them into practice is growing ever more difficult. They note, for instance, that the number of researchers needed to achieve the famous Moore’s Law doubling of computer chip density is more than 18 times larger than the number required in the early 1970s. A similar phenomenon is seen in other areas such as medicine and agriculture. Their conclusion: “Just to sustain constant growth in GDP per person, the United States must double the amount of research effort every 13 years to offset the increased difficulty of finding new ideas.”

The post-virus world will be one of big fiscal deficits for governments everywhere, including in Washington. Science research is one area that should not only be spared the budget ax, but actually given far greater funding. More investment, please! That, especially as we all experience the results of failing to do so.