At the same time, labs and researchers and equipment cost real money. There are opportunity costs. There some good reasons to not spend money on wild conjectures.
Eh, you can allocate a percentage of resources on wild conjectures, since many of our biggest discoveries have been made that way. No need to shut them down and ridicule them.
So after years without results you'll continue propping up the one long shot you picked?
My larger point is that you're treating this like there are just a couple wild conjectures that need just a bit of money. There are vast amounts of alternative ideas, and often the necessary experiments will not be cheap. While ridiculing them isn't right, the idea that obviously we should fund them is ridiculous.
The discovery of antibiotics happened by accident while performing a completely different study, following that example we shouldn't fund these projects at all.
And you severely underestimate the number of moonshots there are. Imagine trying to find penicillin by the method you describe. There are thousands of species of mold, many of which are harmful to humans. The genus penicillium alone has over 300 species. Such a study would take decades while costing a fortune before reaching any results.
So after years without results you'll continue propping up the one long shot you picked?
You need basic research to move science and technology forward. And you need to accept that the majority of the research will have no direct result for a long time or ever.
The history of flight spans back 2000 years.
Semi conductors date back to the late 1800s. And don’t forget that to even get to the beginnings of understanding semi conductors, a bunch of basic stuff needed to be figured out first.
Darwin took 2 decades collecting evidence and writing On the Origin Of Species.
And at some point we stopped trying to make fake birds wings to flap our way to flight, as our understanding grew to the point where we knew it was incredibly unlikely to work.
Yes, basic research is necessary and developments sometimes take a long time. That doesn't mean you should keep following a route that repeatedly leads to a dead end. And every hypothesis isn't equally deserving of funding.