So you'd rather he not invent the telescope? Because inventing the telescope "provides no net-wealth to society?"
And don't forget this:
"By March 2009 Spread was moving dirt. Soon it had 125 construction crews working at once. [...] At 825 miles and 13.3 milliseconds, Spread's circuit shaves 100 miles and 3 milliseconds off of the previous route of lowest latency. [...] Spread won't disclose cost, but Jason Cohen, the chief operating officer of Allied Fiber, which is building a nationwide network, says laying cable through easy terrain runs $200,000 per mile. Half of Spread's route, however, is through tough virgin terrain, pushing forbes' estimate of its cost toward $300 million."
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2010/0927/outfront-netscape-jim...
And, back away from the hypothetical, obviously from my post I think Galileo's telescope was great overall.
Financial incentive drives creation. Programable gate arrays that can keep a limit order book drive sales of the cards. If more cards are sold, they get cheaper. If they are cheaper, they are more accessible for medical imaging.
What impact on the national fiber network has the Spread line had? What has it taught us?
World War II spurred development of new metal alloys, better vehicles, and thousands of other innovations. Does that make Hitler a hero? Was war the only path?
(Sorry, I had to Godwin it before this thread got too long; the more general war analogy isn't too far off though: $300-million in heavy-equipment laden fiber laying probably resulted in some injury--is it too much to ask that we both get the beneficial externalities of R&D and put in the fiber for a useful purpose in the first place?)