Quote:
Originally Posted by Howard the Duck
i find the both of you to be too smug in either direction
isn't there some sort of midway point you can both agree upon
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Sure, if new knowledge is locked inside a vault and never used for anything, then it's not helping anyone except perhaps giving some work to whoever it was who figured stuff out.
Is that an alright middle way?
The worth of available knowledge is essentially incalculable because you don't know what that knowledge will be used for tomorrow. Knowing the human genome may help along the medicine that cures cancer or restores damaged brain tissue. You can now get potatoes that are cold hardy because they express a gene that was found in arctic cod. Every time you discover a new genes, whether it's in a plant or insect or whatever, that could be tremendously useful. Something which turns out to be useful today could still be useful a million years into the future.
You fantasized about portals in space or something. We don't magically just get there. We have to know an awful lot of stuff before we can get there and figuring stuff out about background radiation may just be stepping stones leading to that point in the future when we'll be popping through wormholes. The point being that even knowledge that at present is not used for anything practical may be in the future.