I'm not sure you're actually looking back on it more objectively. In fact it looks a lot more like you got burned or denied some grant or funding and are now a

I'm not sure you're actually looking back on it more objectively. In fact it looks a lot more like you got burned or denied some grant or funding and are now a bit bitter and lashing out on these. This is an assumption but you're probably from the US since you used the "justify taxpayers money" catchphrase that's so overused as FUD for the spending narrative over there. So how about these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States#Programs_spending_more_than_$1.5_billion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_... Are they worth it? What are they good for? How many generals and support staff do you need? How do you measure and know it's enough? What's the breakthrough another plane, ship, tank, spy tech, drone at the cost of 700B to 1T per year would achieve? (and please be specific if you're going to reply, not the old "because it's worth doing" argument -- that could justify any amount of spending) I think there are worthier things you should have opinions about than science spending because you seem very worried about the worthiness of it all. The worthiness of scientific progress and discovery? Should every paper be worthy? Must everything be immediately right and world changing? I'm surprised why someone that claims to have been in the field needs some sort of instant gratification for scientific work since that's rarely how science works. Not many cutting edge scientific breakthroughs can be said to have been "worth it" immediately. Sometimes it takes years, decades or even centuries for us to actually figure out the true value of some discoveries. We should never stop building or financing science or scientific experiments and we should never say that "it's enough", that's just nonsense.