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Once all of society is emancipated from wage labor scientists can work on their niche interest without requiring specific funding.
For projects that requiring great amount of resources I don’t think there is a solution to your problem.
Obviously not all crack pot ideas can be entertained with hadron collider level funding. We have to fund what is the best guess at what will advance scientific knowledge and there is going to be some level of debate and consensus reaching to do that.
I think you will have to trust that a scientific society will recognize the value of blue sky research more than corporation with short term profit incentives, and this is already observable to an extent with respect to government funded research vs private.
A lot of materials for certain kinds of research are extracted from Asia, Africa, South America etc. They also frequently involve the destruction of environments in those continents where indigenous people may live. Obtaining materials and machinery for research in a socialist country would necessarily involve international trade, which I think would mean that a lot of groups other than just scientists would be involved in decisions about how to obtain and allocate resources for research. There would be:
- foreign policy considerations (what are the pros and cons of buying centrifuges from a capitalist country which is quietly funding proxy wars against us?),
- probably some amount of triaging as a result (“we can’t produce these machines or materials solely via our own resources or those of our allies, so we’ll have to work around that”),
- environmental concerns. For example Brazil, Zaire, Nigeria, Canada have huge reserves of niobium. Niobium mining is extremely environmentally destructive, and it’s a crucially important material for aerospace and electronics. Even if a socialist country tries to reconfigure how we negotiate with people in those countries for their resources - like trying to trade more equitably with indigenous people of those places (which by the way we simply wouldn’t be able to do in many cases as the people indigenous to some of those places don’t own their own land and have been superseded by settler governments) - we will still be incentivizing environmental destruction. Even a lot of “green” technologies like solar cells etc require extraction of materials which destroys local ecosystems.
- budgeting issues. In this scenario we’re a socialist country, and there are other socialist countries in the world who may be willing to share resources in order to develop collectively, but otherwise we’re looking at spending a lot of money on materials from the rest of the world while also trying to ensure that everybody in our country is provided for. The capitalist world, particularly if it is still headed by the US, may want to cut off our resources as much as possible. This leads again to the triaging thing I talked about - any basic or blue sky research would probably be bottlenecked by considerations of practical applications. That may have to continue for a very long time, until communism is the dominant economic system and the scientific community can cooperate freely and globally in order to maximize the pursuit of knowledge without having to worry as much about budgeting to survive blockades, trade fuckery, wars (proxy and direct) etc.
Still thinking about this, these are scattered thoughts, but yeah. It will be very complicated and difficult, and not everybody is going to get to do what they want to do.
For fossils or other ancient artifacts they should be housed,stored, and researched by those who live where it is found.
