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Research for the sake of research is how we make discoveries we never thought possible.
The best discoveries are the ones that start with somebody going, “Huh, that’s weird…”
Absolutely! The mentality that it's "wasted time and resources" is exactly how you extinguish progress, invention, and ultimately the ability to innovate existing tools.
I remember listening to an NPR podcast and it was talking about wasting money in science. There was that "shrimp fight club" and millions being spent on it. Turns out the money was for a science lab and for students wages and just a bit of money went on the shrimp experiment. Didn't stop the headlines though. When the scientist went to explain the point to the politicians. They said that the shrimp shells were so resilient and lightweight and studying it could yield military benefits. The politician said that they would only care about that specific use case. The scientist had to explain you don't get one without the other.
I freaking love that! And I have a feeling conversations like that happen pretty often, and I have to know if they are documented now!
This one's not even that far out there. Understanding how ants think has direct applications! Ants must take many thousands of steps in a day; being able to count them precisely requires certain cognitive facilities we wouldn't otherwise know existed. Next step: figure out how those things work with such simple cognition. Then apply that to self-organizing robots and use them to cure cancer or something.
I mean, we could even try to extract how this works and use it to create a biological processor. Or a myriad of other stuff. This is actually a really interesting discovery