But we can do it all. Moreover a large number of talented people really want to do it. Whatever money they are asking for is a fraction of the cumulative benef

But we can do it all. Moreover a large number of talented people really want to do it. Whatever money they are asking for is a fraction of the cumulative benefits these people have provided to humanity. When arguing about money you never argue about "science discoveries", no-one in their right mind cares about them when it comes to fundamental science, when you talk about this level of funding. If you manage to build a 100 TeV detector you need to figure out a mind boggling number of practical technical challenges along the way. All of those sum up to a value that is far larger than 10 billion. For other projects like the Human Genome project or the Brain projects the ROI seems more immediate. But in fact physics projects have routinely yielded higher ROIs. There is an extremely long tail of physics / technology research that is funded by a new detector. As another example take the EU quantum initiative, they managed to get ~1 Billion and have promised to get ~5000 people working on it for ~10 years. That works out to ~20000 per person / per year. This only works because a lot of these people are so passionate about this project, that they are willing to self exploit themselves for years.