> to justify large investment it needs to yield something useful in practice
The really important scientific work doesn't follow this rule and demanding it does is short-sighted. Perhaps worse, it's refusing to learn from plenty of historical examples where you can see the work yielded nothing of immediate use but was still very important (that is to say, society would look vastly different without it). In a sense, it's this kind of goal-oriented thinking that led society to the mess that it has become in the last 15 years.
How many of those historical examples cost so much though? With $100 billion you could give $10000 to 10 million people. Or spend it on retraining or some other education.
Most previous science discoveries weren't throwing around oodles of money.
The really important scientific work doesn't follow this rule and demanding it does is short-sighted. Perhaps worse, it's refusing to learn from plenty of historical examples where you can see the work yielded nothing of immediate use but was still very important (that is to say, society would look vastly different without it). In a sense, it's this kind of goal-oriented thinking that led society to the mess that it has become in the last 15 years.