I agree. Think about the Manhattan Project: six years from concrete idea to working prototype. For three of those years, they had a significant chunk of Earth's

I agree. Think about the Manhattan Project: six years from concrete idea to working prototype. For three of those years, they had a significant chunk of Earth's smartest people living and working together with few distractions or outside responsibilities, an almost unlimited budget, supported by satellite sites all over the U.S. (plus Canada and Britain), logistic support supplied by the military with high priority, and, oh yeah, the motivation that if they didn't win the race Germany could rule the world. For today's most important "moonshots," like fusion and large scale water purification and pulling lots and lots of carbon out of the atmosphere and colonizing the solar system, we might not even have the kind of clear starting point they had, where the fundamental science had been done and the rest was mostly engineering. It doesn't seem like solving these problems is compatible with any kind of near-term profit motive. It feels like the corporate version of a lottery: if enough people buy lottery tickets, someone will win. It just probably won't be you. If enough organizations with gigantic piles of cash spend them on long-term research, life on this planet could get way better for all of us. But each organization would have to individually decide to do something whose most likely effect is just throwing money away. So how do you convince a corporation to start buying lottery tickets?