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I'd rather fund all of those things a thousand times over just by cutting a small fraction of funding to the world's militaries.

You seem to underestimate the cost of a lot of science (not to mention that more money doesn't necessarily mean we'll get more results, maybe just the same result duplicated).

The ISS is the most expensive structure ever built, after all.

The ISS is perhaps "the exception that proves the rule": its political value is vastly greater than its scientific value.

That's absurd. The majority of budget isn't the military.

Welfare and social program expenditures could also be significantly reduced by reducing the cost of curing and preventing disease.

Vaccinations (medical science) and disease control / pandemic response are not as divorced from "workings of the universe" as I think you think they are...

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jul/11/cia-fake-vaccin...

Even vaccinations are used for other purposes than to keep people healthy. Clever, but likely to have a lot of adverse side-effects.

At this point we can upgrade that from "likely" to "certain", because it has had a lot of adverse effects in terms of actually being able to vaccinate people in Pakistan.