Comment by jiggawatts

This kind of thing always reminds me G. H. Hardy, a mathematician that famously took pride in working on pure number theory, which he described as having "no practical use" and therefore being morally superior to applied mathematics connected to war or industry.

This ended up as the theoretical bedrock upon which modern encryption algorithms are built, enabling trillions of dollars of economic activity (as well as spying and other nefarious or ethically questionable activities).

I noticed (as have others) that even the purest of pure fundamental research has this oddly persistent pattern of becoming applied to everyday problems sooner or later.

The x-ray telescope mirror design used for Chandra -- motived only by pure intellectual curiosity -- ended up being a key development stepping stone towards ASML's TWINSCAN tools that use focused x-rays for chip lithography. Arguably this is more important to the global economy now that even oil is!

Similarly, particle accelerators like CERN might be the next chip lithography beam sources. The technologies being developed for research physicists such as laser-driven "desktop" accelerators might be just the ticket to replace tin droplet x-ray light sources.

Who knows?

We certainly won't if we don't built these things for pure research first to find out!