I say: yes. You argue practicality. Fine. What practical value do you have with that? Any time machines been built yet?
The whole world is looking for the cure for cancer, but they don't even have an effective treatment for psoriasis. Sometimes "practical" is in the eye of the beholder.
Agreed. However, to only work on science with immediate applications is rather short-sighted, I think. Sometimes one can't forsee uses of cutting edge discoveries - Heinrich Hertz didn't believe his discovery of how to produce radio waves would be of any practical use, for instance; back then it was just a curious fulfillment of a theoretical prediction of Maxwell's equations. Does the search for new elementary particles have immediate applications? No. In a hundred years, who knows? If we have, someone in thr future will be glad that the groundwork has already been laid.