This isn't an "either or" situation. You can do both. The absolute dollar value might seem high, because we're working with the budget of not just a country bu

This isn't an "either or" situation. You can do both. The absolute dollar value might seem high, because we're working with the budget of not just a country but the wealthiest country, but as a percentage it is quite low. You can certainly pull funds from other areas too, like the military, which also greatly benefit from such research endeavors. Even if these were exclusively non-weapons and non-military based technologies being developed it'd be naive to not recognize that the best military defense is to stop a war before it happens. That comes through many avenues, but notably the development of new technologies, especially those that benefit people as a whole (e.g. medicine or see the Taiwan strategy). But even then, it would also be naive to think that the same technology couldn't be adapted to military uses. Anything can be a weapon if you use it wrong enough. But note that we're also seeing a reduction in federal research funding. We're also seeing less fundamental research and these types of problems need a strong pipeline through the classic TRL scale[0]. I think you'll find some of that discussion over in yesterday's thread about Bell Labs. The pipeline doesn't work if you don't take risks and are rushing. You need a fire under your ass but too hot and you get burned. It's easy to be myopic in today's settings, and that's not a great idea for an organization who needs to have an outlook in terms of decades and centuries (i.e. government) as opposed to the next election cycle or next quarterly earnings report. Mind you, we've done these things before. Both the Space Race and Manhattan Project. At the height of the Space Race NASA's budget was over 4.41% of the federal budget[2]. I'm not sure what percent the Manhattan Project's budget was, but it is very clear that this is A LOT cheaper than what actual war costs[3]. We're talking about less than a month of war costs. Remember, we spent over a $750bn over in Iraq[4]. The question is not if we have the money, but what we want to spend it on. Personally I'd rather stuff like this than bombing people. Frankly, you can eat the cake too, as it makes it cheaper to bomb people as well... [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_readiness_level https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_readiness_level [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43957010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43957010 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project#Cost https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project#Cost [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_War