Every good aspect of modern life and modern medicine, technology, etc started with fundamental research that can be made to sound silly.

Some grad student studies the effects of alcohol on fish, learns something new about biology, publishes it so that other students and researchers learn about it, and a few years later after some new studies based on that initial research we get a new cancer drug.

Somebody spends $1 million studying the effects of music on dairy cows, learns that they produce more milk if calming music is played and farmers increase revenues by $10 million per year by adding speakers to their milking rooms.

The billions of dollars spent blowing up infrastructure in the middle east is just a loss, but money spent on research is how we've cured diseases, increased crop yields, launched satellites, and made it so that everyone can have a supercomputer in their pocket that can stream HD video through the air.