“Well I think these strange scientists should stop wasting their time peering over microscopes when there’s more important things to do… you know… things that common folk like us can understand and relate to immediately” - any typical anti-reason anti-science (probably religious) dolt, ignorantly vulnerable to things like cholera because they draw their water from the same river where people piss, shit and litter upstream.
When somebody says something like that, I bring up ancient Greeks rubbing amber on cat fur to investigate static electricity. It would have been very easy 2500 years ago to complain about these idiots rubbing cats with rods while there were bigger issues to solve. It’s not like they could say “hold on bro there’s this sick thing called the internet and this is step 1 to invent it!”. But we’re all glad people like that persevered or we’d never have electricity. In fact our word for electricity comes from the greek word for amber, elektron. Learning something new about the world is always worthwhile, even if you don’t know why just yet
