[dnautics]

>In the real world, there's a bound on the amount of money that should be funneled into research. That bound should probably less than the amount of money it would take to bankrupt the supporting country

More to the point, it should realistically take into account the real capabilities of the scientific community at large. If president Obama decided tomorrow, "hey, we're going to sink $10T into creating warp drive by the end of the decade": how many charlatans do you think would start scurrying toward the money? How many legitimate physicsts would shrug their shoulders knowing they'd just lost out on their collider grants and cobble together proposals for a piece of their action, scientific integrity be damned? How many startup companies would be formed as R&D rent-seekers to develop "next-gen metallurgy and materials science for the project"? And do you think that we would really have warp drive at the outset of 10 years?

Why is it so hard to consider that maybe, just maybe, we are already overinvested in science now, just as we would be if we sunk $10T into warp drive today? All the hallmarks are there. Record levels of fraud (see retractionwatch if you want your soul to sink a bit), severe PhD employment pipeline problems...