> My solution is: take a piece of the federal budget and give $1-3MM to anyone with a far fetched idea that has a prototype to back it up. No long processes. If 30K -mostly students- a year get a mill to develop their thing, I suspect we would find ourselves way into the future in just a decade. And that’s just $30-90B/y

We already do this with grants at all levels of government. And guess what: it's a highly political activity, and prone to corruption. What's a remotely good idea?