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I honestly believe that if the US alone used all of its military funds on researching fusion power, we'd have figured it out by now lol.
NASA made remarkable innovations in its prime during the Apollo missions because of the amount of people efficiently working on so many new technologies with proper funding.
There's a kind-of soft ceiling on scientific progress created by the Unknown Unknowns.
We didn't think we'd need to optimize silicon waffer chips before we could engineer a solution to a net-positive fusion reaction. We didn't consider the impact plastics tech in the 80s would have on our ability to survive in deep space in the 2000s. We had no idea adding lead to our gasoline and paint would set back our national intellectual output by a generation.
Consider that we do spend a substantive portion of our military budget on blue sky technological advancements. But because we put military leaders in charge, and because these dipshits will finance $10B to put screen doors on submarines if you promise them jobs on the company board when they retire, we end up with enormous malinvestment. Similarly, consider the $13B Microsoft sank into OpenAI to make a very advanced version of Clippy.
At some level, I don't think its an issue of Take $X and put it into Y projects. I think you need to till the soil and irrigate the field and see what grows. That means doing basic shit like feeding and housing and vaccinating people, educating them at the primary-to-collegiate level at cost, and keeping credit lines open to even the "least worthy" of us, so you can get the kind of inventiveness that paves the way for advancement.
I can't remember what it was, maybe some short story by Ray Bradbury, but I first read it in high school (so somewhere between 1999 and 2003) that took place in the distant future of 1998.
Also, wasn't 1984 set in the future of when it was written? 🤔
I think this still happens. People have no concept of time when we look 10+ years out. 10 years isn't really that long. I think life is going to look very much the same in the next 40 years with the biggest change being AI tools if they can get past the "idiotification" of LLMs and the like as they are subject to human interaction.
I think you're absolutely right. It's funny watching old shows/interviews where people seem very similar to modern day "doomers". They always had legitimate reasons to be worried (like we do), but similarly, they struggle to conceptualize life going on like normal a few decades into the future.
"Future events like this will affect us in the future..."