> I frequently have my doubts, having left. If it makes you feel any better... I left fundamental particle physics for EE, since that's a lot more employable

> I frequently have my doubts, having left. If it makes you feel any better... I left fundamental particle physics for EE, since that's a lot more employable and it turns out being a particle physics experimentalist actually involves a pretty heavy EE load anyway. As part of my refocus I ended up doing all the EE work for a NIH- and DoD-funded medical research effort. This is a very different area of science than physics or astrophysics! And it's, uh, mostly all garbage. An optimist might be happy if Sturgeon's Law applied and only 90% of it is crap. I could just as well say that the only goal of biomedical research is to employ biomedical researchers. So much time and money was wasted on research that was hyperspecialized or somehow just trivial, and didn't appear to be of any use beyond writing more grants and papers for the next generation of the lab's students. (And that's not even counting the animal research. I won't get involved in that stuff personally; that's not because I'm fundamentally opposed or anything, but because I've seen just how little is really learned from most such programs.) And now I'm a consulting EE fully in the private sector. And guess what? Most projects that my company gets involved in are similarly doomed, right from the start. I guess I'm trying to say a few things here: 1. I hear you. Oh, man, do I hear you. 2. At least astronomy gets what it pays for. Medical research sure doesn't! 3. Research has gotten hard. Long gone are the days when you could literally look through a handheld telescope or microscope and make a major discovery. Now discoveries are made by massive, interdisciplinary teams, and the teams are only getting larger. But the structure of research organizations has not evolved to meet the new reality, for many disparate reasons. (Case in point: Nobels still only go to three people, maximum.) 4. Similar budgeting and planning problems affect the entire economy. (And no, I personally don't believe central planning is the answer.) At some level, keeping us all busy kind of seems to be the point of it all. 5. If you want to see a similar soul-search, the thread the other day about building a new collider should show you the HEP people going through the same thing. (Though the interest-boredom product on that one didn't manage to exceed my threshold, so I didn't go through it.) 6. If universal basic income frees up enough the time of enough specialists, that could be really awesome for research. I'd love to build a telescope (again...)! And if I didn't have to worry about putting the proverbial food on my table, it would be fantastic to do that. But, alas, I fear that any specialist worth having is one who could find lucrative employment easily enough, even in an enviroment of UBI. 7. Seriously, don't feel too bad about yourself, telescopes are awesome! From both a science and engineering point of view. There are way worse things society could and would have spent that money on.