I understand that point of view as well.
I guess my real issue is my own selfishness. I think the problems will ultimately be solved, but at my age, I doubt I'm likely to see anything other than the "worse" in "things will get worse before they get better," no matter how aggressively we act.
The pessimism I experience and most frequently encounter has nothing to do with the scientific or even the technical possibility of dealing with the problem, but the social and political.
We've known of the need to do something since the mid-1980s and earlier. Before internet! I gave my first presentation on anthropogenic climate change (when it was still known as global warming) to my high school's science club in 1973.
We know what we need to do. We know the majority of how to do it. And we've known the what and how for almost as long as we've been aware of the need.
My pessimism arises from the fact that those who are greedy for power, resources, and/or money are also, by definition, selfish assholes who tolerate nothing that affects their agenda and who have the resources to con the general public into following their agenda.
This is what word problems are.
Things may have changed since my graduation in 1974, but my experience was that word problems were contrived scenarios with little or no relevance to my life. I was pretty good at math and had very good reading comprehension, so I never actually struggled with any of it.
But not once was I ever asked to calculate the storage requirements for a collection of toys, where on the teeter-totter to sit to balance it, how long a ladder needed to be to safely used to get on top of a given roof, or safe maximum driving speed given standard reaction times under various conditions of low visibility.
Instead, it was all stuff that sounded like a surrealist riddle. (If a chicken-and-a-half can lay an egg-and-a-half in a day-and-a-half, how long will it take for a frog with a wooden leg to kick through a pickle?)
And besides being pretty good at it, I actually enjoyed math once other interests and working with my dad in the shop showed me just how useful it can be.
Just leave it as water, then drop small pellets of lithium in as necessary. Sodium works, too, and is more abundant/available than lithium, but maybe tougher to control safely. (The rest of that group is just too reactive, unless you can find a way to use the exothermic reaction for something other than an uncontrolled fire or even explosion.)
Mostly kidding, but only because I can't imagine smarter people than I haven't ruled it out for very good reasons. And while I'm on the topic, running a condenser on the exhaust will capture the water vapour, which is an extremely powerful greenhouse gas.
Hmmm. I've seen a few references to Toyota supposedly having a prototype system for generating hydrogen from water on board cars. I've dismissed that as just the latest water powered flavour of the month. You don't suppose...
(looks around)
I thought we did.
That's not what I got from the article. They seemed to be talking specifically about chemicals have absorbed from what they've been in contact with.
Yes, but it's important to remember that a much (most?) of that work was performed by those with hereditary wealth, under the patronage of those with hereditary wealth, under the patronage of the church, or by clergy who had plenty of free time beyond their duties and no separate need to earn income for housing and food. In fact, one reason to enter the clergy was to gain access to the resources to pursue other activities.
The self-proclaimed experts really muddy the waters. As do those seen to be experts by virtue of their charm, charisma, fame, or actual expertise in bullshitting. Another issue is those who claim to be or are judged to be experts in one field by virtue of their legitimate expertise in another.
I think there are actual experts as long as we're willing to define the term in a way that doesn't confer wisdom or in relation to what remains unknowable. For me, a true expert is someone who knows more about something than the vast majority of people, is continually striving towards expertise and mastery, and can explain things to those with little or no expertise.
Also, I think expertise is a range, not an absolute. It's completely reasonable to accept the expertise of your local accountant without also thinking that they could be the CFO of a Fortune 500 company.
For myself, I try to embrace the unknowns as new adventures or ignore them as irrelevant to the task at hand. I don't know why there are so many joinery techniques in woodworking or how to choose the most appropriate for a particular situation, but I'm having fun learning. At the same time, joinery is irrelevant to many of my projects, where doing everything by eye with scraps on hand using nails and screws gets the job done quickly and effectively.
I remember taking typing (on manual typewriters!) in high school before the personal computer.
I don't know if it was then, or 20 years later when I was taking a desktop publishing course, but I remember being told that, just like dashes, spaces come in 2 widths. The en-space, which goes between words, and the em-space, which goes between sentences. (There are other widths used in kerning, the spacing between letters.) The two-space convention of typing was an approximation of that.
This part I know I got from that desktop publishing course: As a result, the two space convention should be followed only when working with monospaced fonts, proportional fonts that don't offer an em-space, or software that isn't smart enough to use the correct space in the appropriate places and you're too lazy to do it by hand. (I used find and replace for that last case when em-spaces were available.)
Now, I can't say I really care. :)
I also think there are better places to put this kind of money, including on projects that we are certain have obvious potential to change the world for the better.
What I was getting at was the very idea that we absolutely have to know what the return is before we start. Just because we know the potential return doesn't mean that it's not research (as in your fusion example), but just because we can't identify a return ahead of time doesn't mean there won't be one.
Also, I don't know if there have been any tangible benefits from the LHC. Precision manufacturing? Improvements in large-scale, multi-jurisdiction project management? Data analytics techniques? More efficient superconducting magnets? I don't know if those are actual side effects of the project and, if they are, I don't know that the LHC was the only way to get them.
Edit: or, like the quantum physics underlying our electronics, maybe we won't know for 50-100 years just how important that proof was.
Yes, with finite resources, we have to make choices. As long as there are some resources for people to just poke around, I'm good with whatever. If we're actually looking for some place to drop a few billion, I actually don't think another collider should be on the list, let alone at the top.
The problem as I see it is that "but what good is it" is used to limit pretty much all fundamental research.
Never underestimate the power of obsession. I would not be the least bit surprised to learn that right now, as I write this, there is someone out there making their 4327th attempt to engrave "The Lord's Prayer" into a watermelon seed using a handheld sewing needle. And it's probably in an illuminated Gothic script.