[StavrosK]

> So do you pick the wildest conjecture to test, or one of the somewhat more plausible ones?

20% of the former, 80% of the latter.

> And how much money should go into one before you move on?

3% of the available funds each year.

Hope this helps!

[boomboomsubban]

>3% of the available funds each year

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.

[StavrosK]

> the idea that obviously we should fund them is ridiculous.

Ridiculous like feeding people mold to see if they get sick less, or injecting people with the pus of other people to inoculate them?

The discovery of antibiotics alone has paid for all the moonshots you can fund, even if none of them work out.

[boomboomsubban]

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.

[sitkack]

Look at it stochastically, that particular set of events, yeah random chance, super rare. But with similar behaviors, could we make similar discoveries? Hell ya!

And they all feed back on each other. Then some other idea might enable us to discover penicillin by some entirely other serendipitous route. There isn't a single path to the future.

[2muchcoffeeman]

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.

[boomboomsubban]

>The history of flight spans back 2000 years

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.