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That’s exactly the reason the research and development funded by government grants is rarely done in the private sector: It isn’t immediately profitable, and we don’t know for sure if it ever will. It’s important to put man-hours behind even theories that will seemingly never be useful (“trash”), both because it is impossible to know for sure, and because that is the underpinning of science.

Exploration for exploration’s sake, knowledge for knowledge’s sake. Not everything learned by the human race needs to be immediately useful; it all contributes to a vast tapestry.

Not to mention that if we focus solely on profitability and utility, we do bad science: Why do you think we have a reproduction crisis? Because reproducing experiments isn’t sexy nor profitable, so no one is incentivized to do it.

We need more arrows, full-stop.