&quot;That&#x27;s why you need economic calculation (and a firm grounding) to quantify that potential and decide which of the infinite projects that individuals, governments, or humanity can undertake makes the more sense.&quot;<p>Well, my experience of large scale EU funding programmes was that all the efforts to predict the economic yield of research projects was, at best, complete nonsense.<p>After all, who thought that by funding a nuclear research organisation (CERN) we&#x27;d get something like the Web? Has anyone got an economic model that could have predicted that?