@SamanthaJaneSmith @coreyspowell

This is complicated. I did not say "basic science can be trusted not to predict anything".

I just believe, that there are certain fields of research, which are generally not expected to turn into applied research and technology.

Fusion technology is special example, one of my favorites. I am 52 years old. But since my 12 years or so, fusion was available in 30 years. The basic principle works... somehow. For some time. There was tremendous amount of both theoretical and practical work done. Except... it does not seem to be scalable anytime soon. It is like trying to power steam locomotive with Heron steam engine: in theory, it should work. It is even kind of steam turbine! But in fact, the actual steam engine was built quite differently. So you can have knowledge, which is basically right, even known for centuries, but still get no practical results.

The popular summary, that inside fusion reaction, there would be "environment like inside Sun" is oversimplification: Sun is huge, but the average density of fusion reactions inside is just fraction of what would be required inside tokamaks. So the required environment would be actually much more extreme. It works in theory, but the engineering might never be sufficiently advanced - who knows. But the popular belief is, that it may be the only possible future.

So the society is just giving away certain constant, but probably not sufficient, amount of resources to fusion research, always not enough, so the they slowly crawl towards better and better results, which definitely prove, that it works... but at the same time, practical application is always 30 years in the future. You would also activate spent reactor vessels with neutrons, while turning them into heat... not really long life nuclear waste, but still...

So fusion is good question: if we put more money into fusion, than manned spaceflight or let's say, particle accelerators, would we finally get it working?