Compared to what? Civilization spends on a lot of speculative stuff. Venture capital is the art of investing in failures 999 times out of 1000. And personally I'd rather have tens of billions spent on speculative theory research than on, say, Meta's VR boondoggle.
I believe the lesson here is not that we shouldn't invest in speculative theory research. It's that we need more breadth, we need to not get stuck researching only one option.
