The loftiness of your goals, the quantity and seriousness of your papers, and the precision of your speculations don't make you into a science. While there are parts of cosmology that belong within the bounds of science, I personally consider much of the topic to be educated guesses without any immediate prospect of being tested.

Further than that, I absolutely agree with the idea that we should not be spending tremendous amounts of research dollars on cosmology. While it may come as a shock to people who think of themselves as pinnacle of scientific research, there are many areas of science with better chances of return on investment. By this I don't mean that we should only invest in that which we think will bring a return. Serendipity has been a stable of scientific research for centuries and I think will continue to be. But the chances of serendipity are maximized by looking in many directions, and not just a few.

And that, in a nutshell, is my main objection to the scientific priesthood. We spend a half billion dollars on observing objects so faint we are barely sure that we see them at all? Why not spend some of that on modelling the Sun that is so precious to our life? There are problems in fluid dynamics that affect long-term patterns in our climate. We have spent decades with fewer hurricanes, now we have reason to believe that for the next few we will have many more. A few years ago we didn't even guess at the rhythms of the ocean currents that are responsible. Now we do, what are the impacts? What else don't we know about long term climate?

Back when the SSC was under discussion I saw studies indicating that money spent on science paid back very handsomely to society. I believe that. However the same studies when looked at more closely suggested that billion dollar science projects don't pay for themselves. They lose money. If we are to spend that billion, I would like to see it scattered to the winds, come back the unexpected, and then let a future generation with more means come back to the big questions.

After all the questions aren't going away, and we are not about to solve them tomorrow. Why not let them sit? It is like the projections that NASA did about interstellar travel. They concluded that it was best to leave that for better technology. More precisely, they concluded that if we did it as fast as possible, we would get there well after much cheaper projects launched with the benefit of future technologies. Let us get a solid industrial base in orbit, and then we can built super telescopes to our heart's content. Let us build a VLA of radio telescopes from here to Jupiter. After we can do it affordably.

Cheers,
Ben