The original laser was built by the research arm of Hughes Aircraft, so I'm not sure I see the issue there. Even if Hughes was partly funded by defense, I don't really classify defense under the same category as other types of pure research funding because there's typically an actual purpose, which fits the "short-term profit" rather than "long-term benefit of humanity".
Re: CRISPR, wasn't that discovered at least 3 different times on completely independent lines of research? That suggests to me that it's sufficiently "obvious" it would have eventually cropped up in many other areas.
> many revolutionary discoveries come out of basic research paid for by the government and not companies.
Yes. I took no position about this in this specific thread, but I will just say that "X happened this way" is not an argument that X could not have happened any other way, nor that in a world where we didn't discover X because we didn't fund it publicly, we wouldn't have had just as impactful a discovery Y. There are opportunity costs to public funding and tying up intelligent researchers to goals that don't have realizable goals in the near future.
Re: CRISPR, wasn't that discovered at least 3 different times on completely independent lines of research? That suggests to me that it's sufficiently "obvious" it would have eventually cropped up in many other areas.
> many revolutionary discoveries come out of basic research paid for by the government and not companies.
Yes. I took no position about this in this specific thread, but I will just say that "X happened this way" is not an argument that X could not have happened any other way, nor that in a world where we didn't discover X because we didn't fund it publicly, we wouldn't have had just as impactful a discovery Y. There are opportunity costs to public funding and tying up intelligent researchers to goals that don't have realizable goals in the near future.