I don't know whether you have done your calculations but, about two or three years back, I did a first assessment of what the first successful device would be worth and it came out at about 300 trillion dollars.
It is not necessarily true that expensive experiments are not worthwhile doing but there are plenty of rather cheap experiments which are certainly worth doing.
Disco was brand new then and there were a few jocks that had monstrous sound systems but they wouldn't dare play this kind of music. They would never play a record where only two minutes of the song was all it was worth. They wouldn't buy those types of records.
When somebody has convinced you that you're not worth anything to anybody anymore, and they spend a lot of time doing it, you start believing it yourself.
I got sober. I stopped killing myself with alcohol. I began to think: 'Wait a minute - if I can stop doing this, what are the possibilities?' And slowly it dawned on me that it was maybe worth the risk.
