>Absolutely not.

A statement that certain needs some backing.

You might say that the statement you were replying to also needs some backing, but they did give some, although you believe it was incorrect.

It just seems that "absolutely not" goes against the conventional wisdom that knowledge for knowledge sake will lead to some greater return than was expended on getting that knowledge somewhere down the road which really is one of the main underlying ideas of Western Civilization since before Newton.

Absolutely not means future society will not be better off! That seems to be a big weird absurdly pompous and conceited statement to make unless you have a time machine, or at least a big mess of statistics that can show that scientific advances in physics for a significant amount of time has failed to provide a return value on existence, although I would think that does not rise to the promise of "absolutely not".