Just keep on piling ever more of the spoils of 'progress' on the 0,1%, while keeping the rest in a dog eat dog 'job hunt' struggle for survival, and you will have no shortage of 'volunteers'.

I totally get the '0.1%' thought here, the idea being that the majority of this scientific progress will only benefit those how can afford it.

Personally, I'd be hoping for more universal advancement. I hope society gets to the point where scientific advancements benefit all people, not just the minority that can afford such advancements.

As with most advancements, it's doubtful we'll ever get to a time period where we'll discover/invent/create/do something new and suddenly it's available to everyone. All things get cheaper with time, and scale eventually propagates once-expensive things out to more of the populace. In most cases the higher origin cost funds manufacturing advancements or research to bring down other costs, which make the argument that targeting the 0.1% is actually necessary for a wider distribution later.

Rather than thinking in terms of "all these crazy improvements will only be for the 0.1%", it's important to think of them on a per-advancement basis. Each one will be expensive at first, and then get cheaper; and as we start seeing cheaper things available, we will also continue to see more advancements that are inevitably targeted at the 0.1% that will also eventually fall in price, and the cycle should continue indefinitely. I don't think we'll ever hit a period where there are no more advancements to be made, which means there will always be previous iterations that are available for cheaper than the cutting edge of anything.

What is an astronaut, especially the early ones ?