Honestly, in this case I'd much rather trust the government (more specifically, certain sects of it) than investors in choosing and funding technologies. The go

Honestly, in this case I'd much rather trust the government (more specifically, certain sects of it) than investors in choosing and funding technologies. The government may be corrupt and unwieldy and inefficient, but it is operating on (I would argue) a better feedback loop that acts on much more data (not only scientific, but social as well) and with a much better scientific workforce. Take a look at what DARPA is investing in now: http://www.darpa.mil/our_work/ http://www.darpa.mil/our_work/ While much of it is unfortunately directed in part towards destruction and warfare, the projects are above and beyond what investors are investing in. Just a quick look at the Microsystems group projects: "The Casimir Effect Enhancement (CEE) program seeks to manipulate forces very near surfaces to enable control of small-scale phenomena, including nanodevice adhesion and friction. The objectives of this single-phase DARPA program are to demonstrate unambiguous detection, neutralization, and dynamic manipulation of the Casimir force to modulate between normal and neutralized states. Some approaches to these program goals include the development of new materials, engineered nanostructures, or active elements. Recent research activities (models and experiments) have already identified manipulation of the Casimir force as an important challenge." Edit: To clarify the feedback loop comment: I think the jury is still out on the effect of economic incentives. In my opinion, looking at the degradation of privately funded pure research over the last 30-40 years (Bell, Xerox PARC, etc), economic incentives are only effective once someone (usually academia funded by the gov't) has laid the ground work. Investors will not do that.