[SkyBelow]

>That is a political problem and it is solvable. If Western governments can find the public support for trillions in military expenditures, I am confident that it can be found for the comparably meager budgets of the scientific establishment.

Is it solvable? Humans are notoriously bad at certain things and investing in things that aren't showing interesting results is one of them. How many companies will cut something that prevents problems because they don't see problems?

If you want to solve this, you would need to do it the same way the MIC has solved military funding, by ensuring continued funding of science is necessary for politicians to be re-elected. But that borders close enough to corruption I'm not sure the scientists who need the funding will be agreeable to it, to say nothing of the difficulty engineering this.