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Cannot disagree more. "Making a car is expensive, so let's not do that to explore 1000 miles out. Let's just have 1000 people walk one mile and explore." Sim

• yieldcrv 4y ago
  My immediate skepticism is whether there is a dollar limit to your perspective $100,000,000,000 with afterthought of “sure lets see if we can do it less expensively *since its sooo annoying to some people”? Where is the line for you currently?
• moonchrome 4y ago
  Your analogy is fundamentally flawed. More realistically : we can only build one car in the entire world, where a tiny minority of people can even understand the potential benefit, and anything they see will be completely useless for everyone else in day to day life because we need a civilisation level effort to even detect the implications of their theory. If their theory had some real world implications - you wouldn't need this car. And this is expected to be funded by everyone. It's the modern equivalent of building pyramids.
  • xcambar 4y ago
    With this logic, I assume you'd call the ISS a useless project.
    • inglor_cz 4y ago
      Not the OP, but this is a good example. ISS wasn't useless, but its successor should be much cheaper. We absolutely need to find ways how to do space research more efficiently, otherwise it will stay a luxury of the richest nations. Fortunately, at the very least, launch costs to orbit are dropping and we may hope for further drops in the future - if Starship works as intended.
    • concordDance 4y ago
      In all seriousness, what use is it? How has it improved people's lives?
    • ncmncm 4y ago
      It is, really. At one time, it was the only place the shuttle could get to; and the shuttle was the only thing that could get people to it. Literally the only thing they can do at ISS, not better done with robots, is study how human bodies are affected by exposure to high radiation and long-term weightlessness. Which we care about only because people would be so exposed in ISS-like cans. Now they are pushing the "lunar gateway", that likewise has exactly one reason to exist: SLS could get there. And, it will be a place for SLS to get to. And, even more useless. A thing in high orbit around the moon is absolutely useless for any other purpose, whether you are heading for the moon or beyond it.
    • dehrmann 4y ago
      Would you rather have 1 ISS or 200 New Horizons?
  • l33tman 4y ago
    And yet 15M people yearly are still visiting those "useless" pyramids 4600 years after they were built.
    • Aerroon 4y ago
      Sure, but the people 4600 years ago were the ones that paid the price for building the pyramids. How do 15M people visiting it today help them? We're talking about using everybody's money for these science projects. And this is not money that's voluntarily given, it's taken.
    • moonchrome 4y ago
      I don't really want to dispute that, just want to paint a more realistic of what these scientific projects actually are. They are not investments for sure.
    • unsupp0rted 4y ago
      If the Egyptians had built a literal money pit 4600 years ago, tourists would now be visiting that.
  • navane 4y ago
    It's the social equivalent of rocket ships. We all payed for their space holidays too.
  • musha68k 4y ago
    Europe is so rich it can easily afford all of the great project ideas outlined in the article in addition to a new LHC (and then some). Let's think big indeed, the author unfortunately has a very reductive vision for the future. Instead how about: A renaissance of funding - BIG SCIENCE - education, jobs. That was basically the promise of the EU - peace through wealth - let's create some more. Let's bring back the excitement and scientific wonder of the 1960s. This could be a unilateral vision across the democratic spectrum (everyone wants wealth). And yes, global warming actually should dictate no less. Let's do it now. Oh and let's just fix poverty while we are at it. Again, Europe has the means and could do all of that by itself.
    • xcambar 4y ago
      I thought I was an optimistic but you dwarfed me on this to the point of skepticism.
      • musha68k 4y ago
        No worries, check the numbers - this is all in reach - solely up to us :)
    • JKCalhoun 4y ago
      I feel like the last renaissance of funding (BIG SCIENCE) was the space race. Let's do that again. It was at least a lot more multi-disciplinary than an atom-smasher.
      • xiphias2 4y ago
        The Human Genome Project was a huge success. Being able to read the DNA cheaply got us a revolution in biotech (cancer therapies, gene therapies, mRNA delivery, and my favourite: partial / full cell reprogramming)
    • concordDance 4y ago
      What's it currently doing with that money? I guess we could get rid of funding healthcare and trying to help people out of poverty so that a small number of people get to use a very expensive toy... You know what would be an awesome big science project that would immeasurably improve future people's lives? Sequencing all genes and using that data provide free embryo selection services to everyone who wants to be a parent. Would probably cost the same as that giant particle smasher and but unlike the giant ring it would pay for itself in a generation.
  • peoplefromibiza 4y ago
    > It's the modern equivalent of building pyramids. I wish it was true, it would be much easier to convince people to have ten of them.
• rocqua 4y ago
  Is the ratio of cost of car to cost of persons walking correct. It seems like the car is a Bugatti Veyron and like there is a huge (exponentially growing) fronteir to explore. Exploring another 1000 miles in a very well studied direction seems less curious than pushing outward another mile over the entire frontier. Especially at the places that have gotten less attention. 'Doing more of the same but bigger' feels more like small thinking than 'lets try lots of things we haven't tried before'. To me the latter also feels a lot more curious.
• discreteevent 4y ago
  I read it as: "Instead of building one really expensive car to continue to explore in one direction let's build lots of cars and explore in all directions". To me that shows an attitude full of curiosity.
  • peoplefromibiza 4y ago
    except there are terrains where a car won't do and you need a giant expensive off-road vehicle. You wouldn't go to the north pole with a VW Beetle. Same thing applies here, smaller cars that explore in all direction can probably find a local maxima and get stuck there.
    • musha68k 4y ago
      There also is no shortage in funds and we could actually do all of that and more.
      • rbanffy 4y ago
        Just say you can weaponize the black holes formed in the LHC and you'll never run out of funding again.
        • musha68k 4y ago
          I just spilled my coffee, thanks XD
  • rbanffy 4y ago
    As all car analogies, this is bad. It's more like "instead of building a space probe to explore the solar system, let's build a thousand cars to explore the grass patch in a thousand directions". Big science projects such as the LHC go very far and very deep in the very fabric of reality. Instead of building a thousand cars, it'd be a good idea to still build the next space probe while, at the same time, use what we learned building the previous one to build a couple cars to explore in different directions.
  • 4y ago
• onpensionsterm 4y ago
  >let's find a way to build/experiment LHC++ less expensively. From the people who brought you compost fueled cars?
• macspoofing 4y ago
  > "Making a car is expensive, so let's not do that to explore 1000 miles out. Let's just have 1000 people walk one mile and explore." "Making a car is expensive, so let's not do that to explore 1000 miles out. Let's instead build an airplane." The problem with next-gen LHC is that there are no guarantees of any new or interesting physics for that $100 billion. And particle accelerators are not the only way to spend large sums of money, so there is an opportunity cost. Why not spend that $100 billion to build more space telescopes or more sensitive LIGOs to detect gravitational waves, etc.
• _heimdall 4y ago
  Curiousity can have many shapes. Being curious about 100,000 smaller questions is no better or worse than being curious about one big one. A lack of curiousity here would have been to sinply say all this money shouldnt be spent on research at all. My read of the article was more a call for considering the practical uses of tge research. If we don't know what $100B worth of LHC will discover, why wouldnt we instead fund tens of thousands of smaller projects that often have very practical real world goals?
• Neil44 4y ago
  I agree, it reads like a variation of 'there's nothing left to discover so lets all go home and not bother'
  • macspoofing 4y ago
    >I agree, it reads like a variation of 'there's nothing left to discover so lets all go home and not bother' I don't think that's quite right. The big problem isn't that there is 'nothing left to discover' because we know there are interesting physics at higher energy scales. What we don't actually know if there is anything interesting at the energy scales that this particle accelerator could achieve. You could literally spend two decades building this, and in the end, all you would do is rule out a tiny energy-scale slice.
• tgsovlerkhgsel 4y ago
  If there is plenty of unexplored space, and all the car helps you do is figure out what is 1000 miles out but you can only explore one direction with it and can't directly bring anything back... yeah, sending 1000 people out one mile is probably more beneficial.
• jvanderbot 4y ago
  "Rather than building yet another city-sized internal combustion engine, but even bigger to carry more further, how about we fund a lot of blue-sky research to determine if there's a way to carry scientists forward without city-sized internal combustion engines?" It appears we suspect there is a better way.