"That's why you need economic calculation (and a firm grounding) to quantify that potential and decide which of the infinite projects that individuals, governments, or humanity can undertake makes the more sense."

Well, my experience of large scale EU funding programmes was that all the efforts to predict the economic yield of research projects was, at best, complete nonsense.

After all, who thought that by funding a nuclear research organisation (CERN) we'd get something like the Web? Has anyone got an economic model that could have predicted that?