&gt; <i>The proper way for you to indicate this sentiment is to downvote my post, and avoid commenting, as per the Hacker News guidelines.</i><p>Eh, I&#x27;m hoping dang will come by and detach the comment. It was a pretty classic middlebrow dismissal. &quot;No need to read the comment! Someone compared something to the apollo project!&quot;, and etc.<p>&gt; <i>My point was that governments are unlikely to support &#x27;moonshots&#x27;, because the &#x27;moonshots&#x27; are unpopular, as well as being bad investments.</i><p>There are other categories of public sentiment than popular and unpopular. It&#x27;s not at all true that we don&#x27;t fund things to the tune of tens of billions of dollars per year in the face of public lack of attention and apathy (and, actually, sometimes approval).