> Notably, a lot of European science in 16-19 centuries was advanced by well-off people who did not need to earn their upkeep, the useless, idle class, as some said.

I heard a recent interview with John Carmack (of DOOM fame) who described his current style of work as "citizen scientist", where he has enough money, but wants to do independent research on AI/ML. I am always surprised that we don't see more former/retired hackers (whom many got rich from a DotCom), decide to "return to the cave" to do something exciting with open source software. Good counterexamples: (1) Mitchell Hashimoto and his Ghostty, (2) Philip Hazel and his PCRE (Perl Compatible Regular Expressions) library. When I retire (early -- if all things go well), the only way to that I can possibly stave off a certain, early death from intellectual inactivity would be something similar. (Laughably: I don't have 1% of the talents that John Carmack has... but a person can try!)