That's definitely a sensible position. However, I believe these goal-oriented research projects have a tendency to fall stuck in local optima. Sometimes breakth

That's definitely a sensible position. However, I believe these goal-oriented research projects have a tendency to fall stuck in local optima. Sometimes breakthroughs may come from just more people working on it and other times they come from discoveries made in unrelated fields. By cutting ourselves off from any expensive moonshot projects without a clear goal like the LHC, some of our hard problems may never be solved and we may never know why.