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I honestly believe that if the US alone used all of its military funds on researching fusion power, we'd have figured it out by now lol.
NASA made remarkable innovations in its prime during the Apollo missions because of the amount of people efficiently working on so many new technologies with proper funding.
There's a kind-of soft ceiling on scientific progress created by the Unknown Unknowns.
We didn't think we'd need to optimize silicon waffer chips before we could engineer a solution to a net-positive fusion reaction. We didn't consider the impact plastics tech in the 80s would have on our ability to survive in deep space in the 2000s. We had no idea adding lead to our gasoline and paint would set back our national intellectual output by a generation.
Consider that we do spend a substantive portion of our military budget on blue sky technological advancements. But because we put military leaders in charge, and because these dipshits will finance $10B to put screen doors on submarines if you promise them jobs on the company board when they retire, we end up with enormous malinvestment. Similarly, consider the $13B Microsoft sank into OpenAI to make a very advanced version of Clippy.
At some level, I don't think its an issue of Take $X and put it into Y projects. I think you need to till the soil and irrigate the field and see what grows. That means doing basic shit like feeding and housing and vaccinating people, educating them at the primary-to-collegiate level at cost, and keeping credit lines open to even the "least worthy" of us, so you can get the kind of inventiveness that paves the way for advancement.
But with more funding we would likely have silicon wafer chips figured out sooner
There are diminishing returns, sure. But tech would still have more quickly developed with more than we have currently put in
But with more funding we would likely have silicon wafer chips figured out sooner
We already throw trillions (with a T) at the development of new silicon wafer chips. I don't think even a Pentagon's budget is going to make it move any faster.
By contrast, I do think increasing the base number of computer engineering graduates would do wonders for the domestic computer industry. Particularly, if those engineers had publicly available cash to incubate their own start-ups and noodle around in university graduate programs outside of the publish-or-perish model.
Forcing everyone to go hat-in-hand to guys like Musk, Theil, and Sam Altman every time they want a crack at the nut is what's holding us back far more than the volume of dollars we spend on those three gatekeepers.