I agree its likely but even if obvious, "it's kind of a waste of time to ponder it" seems so wrong.
Humans are incorrect all the time. Even researchers retract the previously 'proven'. Until the answer is clearly proven beyond all questions, pondering and researching is how we discover the unknown for that question, or error, and often so many other we didn't expect to find but come as a sideline of questioning the known. Intellectual curiously has great value for even boring and known of things.
But the alternative to pondering isn't "do nothing", but rather "do experiments". The philosophy of it all seems rather pointless. I don't have any references, but I'm sure there was a lot of ink spilled about the philosophy of flight, arguing that it was or was not possible a priori, before we actually did it. Was any of it useful? I don't think so!
Humans are incorrect all the time. Even researchers retract the previously 'proven'. Until the answer is clearly proven beyond all questions, pondering and researching is how we discover the unknown for that question, or error, and often so many other we didn't expect to find but come as a sideline of questioning the known. Intellectual curiously has great value for even boring and known of things.