Very interesting! I see that our top scholars have a lot of time on their hands. What other pressing issues can they address in these placid days here on Earth?
Try talking to military personnel who were on Nellis AFB, near target range #4, in the mid 1960's...
Curiously, it has turned out that developed societies do well to let and indeed encourage many of their best minds to engage in flights of fancy without any obvious application to real problems.
Facts and things which turn out to be useful but would not have been found by pursuing uses are often discovered in this way. All of the investigations which overthrew classical physics and led to both general relativity and quantum mechanics were quite divorced from application. The mathematics which went into GR and QM had all been done in advance by mathematicians who did it because it was pretty and interesting to them, not because it was useful. And without it, we wouldn't have atomic energy (and my wife's father would likely have been killed in the invasion of the Japanese home islands in WW II) or lasers (how many of us don't need glasses thanks to the surgical use of lasers?).
Figuring out how to reliably communicate with someone utterly alien, even if never needed for extraterrestrials, might be useful: suppose we notice that the really big neural network architecture computer built with some single quantum scale circuitry is doing things it wasn't programmed to do. . .
And some of us think Muslims are utterly alien.