I can see that many incidental benefits might have come, and will probably continue to come, from these speculations.

(Tho I feel bound to ask in passing if you are asserting that this computer before me would in their absence not have been here or existed in any form whatever?)

Many important medical and chemical discoveries came, likewise, from the alchemists' searches for the Elixir Of Life, and for the Philosphers' Stone which would transmute base metals into gold. But that is hardly an argument for the proposition that we should retrospectively take such searches intrinsically seriously, on their own terms, as science ~~ is it?

~M~