Also, I find the kind of language you're using really grating. The attempt to mystify modern technology in order to strike awe always backfires. Yeah dude, I know what a cell phone is. Sure, they're very cool. But what's the argument you're trying to make?
The only distinction I would make is that "pure science" has also produced many additional findings that are not immediately useful to me today, but some of them might be in the future. (And that's the only prediction I'm making about the future in this entire thread.)
That's why I bristled at the whiggish march of progress you depicted. You can believe that science is an ever increasing grasp of the truth without being naive about what the outcome of that knowledge might be. We could all still nuke ourselves into oblivion, in the most extreme example.
I know people hate that kind of doom and gloom. I'm just saying that, when you make the jump from "wow, science is amazing, look at what we've discovered" to "wow science is amazing, look what technologies it has unlocked" you are implying an inevitability to technological progress that does not exist.
But the original post said "science does not provide the kinds of answers people want." I think what most people want from science is to have better things, or less disease and misery. I would argue that it has done a lot of that in our lifetimes. That doesn't mean everyone is spiritually fulfilled, nor does it mean that we won't nuke each other. But it has done real things that make our lives much better.