Or imagine if the world just went together to try to build fusion reactors. Spending on ITER is 2 billion a year, why not 20 billion a year? We would probably learn a ton about different ways to do it and maybe innovate stuff, maybe we would have already solved the global energy crisis if we had a 20 billion budget for it 10 years ago? Or even better, imagine if instead of spending hundreds of millions to make ads that just serves to make people spend more on consumption, maybe that could be used to make reactors? People would go into research for the money, they would train hard to get the best reactor jobs, it would be the hot new market! All that could be reality, but no, society says "ads are more important, without ads people might forget to spend their money and that would be a tragedy!".
While I also bemoan the massive waste of money and talent on actively harmful things like ads, I think fusion is a pretty huge waste of resources as well, at least given our current understanding of the universe and somewhat plausible technologies. Here[0] is an article explaining some fundamental problems that make fusion very unlikely to ever be a good source of energy.
Biomedical research seems like a much more relevant and much more likely to advance rapidly given more investment area of knowledge. Especially since, even if we were given a free energy machine today, we still wouldn't be able to cure the vast majority of human diseases, nor be much closer to even understanding a good proportion of them.
