Various sailors made important discoveries back when geography was cutting-edge science.  And they don't seem particularly bright.

Vasco De Gama discovered that Africa was circumnavigable.

Columbus was wrong about the shape of the Earth, and he discovered America.  He died convinced that his newly discovered islands were just off the coast of Asia, so that's a negative sign for his intelligence (or a positive sign for his arrogance, which he had in plenty.)

Cortez discovered that the Aztecs were rich and easily conquered.

Of course, lots of other would-be discoverers didn't find anything, and many died horribly.

So, one could work in a field where bravery to the point of foolhardiness is a necessity for discovery.

We've learned a lot about the visual system by looking at ways to force it to wrong conclusions, which we call optical illusions or visual art.  Can we do a similar thing for this postulated social cognition system?  For example, how do actors get us to have social feelings toward people who don't really exist?  And what rules do movie directors follow to keep us from getting confused by cuts from one camera angle to another?

I would highly recommend getting someone else to debug your subconscious for you.  At least it worked for me.  I don’t think it would be possible for me to have debugged myself.
 

My first therapist was highly directive.  He’d say stuff like “Try noticing when you think X, and asking yourself what happened immediately before that.  Report back next week.” And listing agenda items and drawing diagrams on a whiteboard.  As an engineer, I loved it.  My second therapist was more in the “providing supportive comments while I talk about my life” school.  I don’t think that helped much, at least subjectively from the inside.

Here‘s a possibly instructive anecdote about my first therapist.  Near the end of a session, I feel like my mind has been stretched in some heretofore-unknown direction.  It’s a sensation I’ve never had before.  So I say, “Wow, my mind feels like it’s been stretched in some heretofore-unknown direction.  How do you do that?”  He says, “Do you want me to explain?”  And I say, “Does it still work if I know what you’re doing?”  And he says, “Possibly not, but it’s important you feel I’m trustworthy, so I’ll explain if you want.”  So I say “Why mess with success?  Keep doing the thing. I trust you.”  That’s an example of a debugging procedure you can’t do to yourself.

I was depressed once for ten years and didn’t realize that it was fixable.  I thought it was normal to have no fun and be disagreeable and grumpy and out of sorts all the time.  Now that I’ve fixed it, I’m much better off, and everyone around me is better off.  I enjoy enjoyable activities, I’m pleasant to deal with, and I’m only out of sorts when I’m tired or hungry, as is normal.

If you think you might be depressed, you might be right, so try fixing it.  The cost seems minor compared to the possible benefit (at least it was in my case.). I don’t think there’s a high possibility of severe downside consequences, but I’m not a psychiatrist, so what do I know.

I had been depressed for a few weeks at a time in my teens and twenties and I thought I knew how to fix it: withdraw from stressful situations, plenty of sleep, long walks in the rain.  (In one case I talked to a therapist, which didn’t feel like it helped.)  But then it crept up on me slowly in my forties and in retrospect I spent ten years being depressed.

So fixing it started like this.  I have a good friend at work, of many years standing.  I’ll call him Barkley, because that‘s not his name.  I was riding in the car with my wife, complaining about some situation at work.  My wife said “well, why don’t you ask Barkley to help?”  And I said “Ahh, Barkley doesn’t care.”  And my wife said “What are you saying?  Of course he cares about you.”  And I realized in that moment that I was detached from reality, that Barkley was a good friend who had done many good things for me, and yet my brain was saying he didn’t care.  And thus my brain was lying to me to make me miserable.  So I think for a bit and say “I think I may be depressed.”  And my wife thinks (she told me later) “No duh, you’re depressed. It’s been obvious for years to people who know you.”  But she says “What would you like to do about it?” And I say, “I don’t know, suffer I guess, do you have a better idea?”  And she says “How about if I find you a therapist?”  And my brain told me this was doomed to fail, but I didn’t trust my brain any more, so I said “Okay”.

So I go to the therapist, and conversing with him has many desirable mind-improving effects, and he sends me to a psychiatrist, who takes one look at me and starts me on SSRIs.  And years pass, and I see a different therapist (not as good) and I see a different psychiatrist (better).  
 

And now I’ve been fine for years.  Looking back, here are the things I think worked:

—Talking for an hour a week to a guy who was trying to fix my thinking was initially very helpful.  After about a year, the density of improvements dropped off, and, in retrospect, all subsequent several years of therapy don’t seem that useful.  But of course that’s only clear in retrospect.  Eventually I stopped, except for three-monthly check-ins with my psychiatrist.  And I recently stopped that.

—Wellbutrin, AKA Bupropion.  Other SSRIs had their pluses and minuses and I needed a few years of feeling around for which drug and what dosage was best.  I ended up on low doses of Bupropion and escitalopram.  The Escitalopram doesn‘t feel like it does anything, but I trust my psychiatrist that it does.   Your mileage will vary.

—The ability to detect signs of depression early is very useful.  I can monitor my own mind, spot a depression flare early, and take steps to fix it before it gets bad.  It took a few actual flares, and professional help, to learn this trick.

—The realization that I have a systematic distortion in mental evaluation of plans, making actions seem less promising that they are.  When I’m deciding whether to do stuff, I can apply a conscious correction to this, to arrive at a properly calibrated judgement.

—The realization that, in general, my thinking can have systematic distortions, and that I shouldn’t believe everything I think.  This is basic less-wrong style rationalism, but it took years to work through all the actual consequences on actual me.

—Exercise helps.  I take lots of long walks when I start feeling depressed.  Rain is optional. 

    …run electricity through the pipe…

Simpler to do what some existing electric trains do: use the rails as ground, and have a charged third rail for power.  We don’t like this system much for new trains, because the third rail is deadly to touch.  It’s a bad thing to leave lying on the ground where people can reach it.  But in this system, it’s in a tube full of unbreathable hydrogen, so no one is going to casually come across it.

That hasn’t been my experience.  I’ve tried solving hard problems, sometimes I succeed and sometimes I fail, but I keep trying.

Whether I feel good about it is almost entirely determined by whether I’m depressed at the time.  When depressed, by brain tells me almost any action is not a good idea, and trying to solve hard problems is particularly idiotic and doomed to fail.  Maddeningly, being depressed was a hard problem in this sense, so it took me a long time to fix.  Now I take steps at the first sign of depression.

Some extraordinary claims established by ordinary evidence:

Stomach ulcers are caused by infection with Helicobacter Pylori.  It was a very surprising discovery that was established by a few simple tests.

The correctness of Kepler's laws of planetary motion was established almost entirely by analyzing historical data, some of it dating back to the ancient Greeks.

Special relativity was entirely a reinterpretation of existing data.  Ditto Einstein's explanation of the photoelectric effect, discovered in the same year.  

Typo: bad->bath.

I’m confused.  Suppose your ring-shaped space hotel gets to Mars with people and cargo that weighs equal to the cargo capacity of 1000 Starships.  How do you get it down?  First you have to slow down the hotel, which takes roughly as much fuel as it took to accelerate it.  Using Starships you can aerobrake from interplanetary velocity, costing negligible fuel.  In the hotel scenario, it’s not efficient to land using a small number of Starships flying up and down, because they will use a lot of fuel to get back up, even empty.  

Would you care to specify your scenario more precisely?  I suspect you’re neglecting the fuel cost at some stage.