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Comment by achn | Hacker News Reader

It’s also the worst investment ever - if the same money was invested in solar farms and research, we could have actual world changing energy sources right now.

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It doesn't work like a game of Civilization. Allocating resources to a research problem means you increase the social and material rewards for a certain type of person to work on a certain type of project. There is no guarantee of success or one to one allocation of resources. It's also not a zero-sum game when the money to one source of energy took away from another.

Also unlike a video game, the tech-tree dependencies are not obvious. We don't know in advance whether a tech will be a productive avenue of R&D, or if it depends on other unrelated advances in theory, material science, or computer modeling, or was actually completely unfeasible in the first place. I find wind power [1] as a case study representative, and we see similar stories for e.g. fusion, cancer research, AI

[1] https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/why-did-we-wait-s...

More money doesn't make the wind blow more often. And there's only.so much capital that can be spent on material science before you hit a limit on the rate of improvement per unit time

An ironic comment, since fusion is the field depending on radical materials advances.

https://cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/research.seas.ucla.edu/dist/d/... slide 13

Unfortunately, nuclear fusion is physics research.

The unsaid part underlying physics research is "if you fund us, we promise to whip you up an atom bomb in 5 minutes if the Russians invade."

Physics research involves precisely zero cost effectiveness justifications.

99.9% is the government of the day thinking "if we do this,

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