Some scientists argue that finding new elements is not worth the money, especially when those atoms are inherently unstable and will disappear in a blink. "I personally don't find it exciting, as a scientist, just to produce more short-lived elements," says Witold Nazarewicz, a physicist who studies nuclear structure at Michigan State University in East Lansing.

But to element hunters, the payoff is compelling. The new elements would extend the table—now seven rows deep—to an eighth row, where some theories predict exotic traits will emerge. Elements in that row might even destroy the table's very periodicity because chemical and physical properties might not repeat at regular intervals anymore. Pushing further into the eighth row also could answer questions that scientists have wrestled with since Dmitri Mendeleev's day: How many elements exist? And how far does the table go?

Source: https://www.science.org/content/article/storied-russian-lab-trying-push-periodic-table-past-its-limits-and-uncover-exotic-new

Ghost Archive: https://ghostarchive.org/archive/VC6Z8

Maybe it's the key to FTL travel, who friggin knows

You don't know what you don't know, sometimes science may not seem useful at first, or even 50-100 years in the future.

Take the fourier transform, some guy in the late 1700s said that you can break down any function* into sines and cosines as in simple waves.

At the time this wasn't very useful except for deriving one equation. Know every single form of signal processing relies on fourier transforms.

So in the case of heavy elements, we simply don't know if this may or may not be useful. However there is a chance it might be, maybe not now, maybe in a 100 years.

*Turns out it has to be a trig function