>> Let the physicists build the damn thing and future society will be better off for sure.

> Absolutely not.

And what do YOU mean, "absolutely not"? You have no more say in what happens than anyone else unless you're high level politician, who would still be beholden to their constituents anyway.

And yet big science, like particle accelerators, STILL gets funding. There's plenty to go around. Sure, every once in a while a political imperative will "pull the plug" on something deemed wasteful or too expensive and maybe sometimes that's right. But we STILL have particle physics, we STILL send out pure science space missions, there are STILL mathematicians and theorists who are paid for their whole careers to study subject matter that has no remotely practical applications.

Not everything must have a straight-line monetary ROI.