I asked a question similar to this. Correct me if I’m wrong, but are you asking how humans come up with the amazing ideas that have formed our society into what it is now? A profound thought in general is extremely subjective, as a profound thought to someone could be deciding to use a water filter instead of buying bottled water every week.
In the book ‘A Short History of Nearly Everything’, Bill Bryson writes about the adventures of various people in the sciences . I’ll type a small excerpt:
“So for four months in the Summer of 1774, Maskelyne lived in a tent in a remote Scottish glen and spent his days directing a team of surveyors, who took hundreds of measurements from every possible possible position. To find the mass of the mountain from all these numbers required a great deal of tedious calculating, for which a mathematician named Charles Hutton was engaged.
The surveyors had covered a map with scores of figures, each marking an elevation at some point on or around the mountain. It was essentially just a confusing mass of numbers, but Hutton noticed (my own emphasis) that if he used a pencil to connect points of equal height, it all became much more orderly. Indeed, one could instantly get a sense of the overall shape and slope of the mountain. he had invented contour lines.”
From what I’ve read, some discoveries come about by one rich guy with a passion for science and curiosity gathering a team to explore the world. One definitely needs resources, but the curiosity is there in all (or most) of us. Even without the money, people are still curious about everything and want to know more. It’s how we survive. You can’t float along in life not questioning things. As far as I know, it just happens because humans receive stimuli and act according to that stimuli.
If there’s stimuli that is new, mysterious, etc, people will want to explore it.