Slightly tangential, but this amazing scientific work makes me wonder how much more we could have achieved over the last 30-40 years, had we diverted even a small fraction of military funding to science and space research. Say, $100B/year.

LLNL's budget is $2.5 billion. The entire Nasa budget is around $25B/year; NSF is $8.5B. It's true that there's also military R&D and of course the majority of R&D is private sector[1], but just saying, what a shame that there isn't more of a national focus.

Not only should we be spending more on civil R&D, but what did we gain from that military expenditure, for example the couple of trillion we poured into Afghan for 20 years?

1. https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsb20203/cross-national-compariso...