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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,

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.
- rendall 4y ago
  Terrifying but intriguing idea. China's one-child policy led to widespread female infanticide and a generation of missing girls. What would prevent some similar unintended consequence in Europe?
  - martin_a 4y ago
    > What would prevent some similar unintended consequence in Europe? We're not some fucked up dictatorship state?!?
    - dane-pgp 4y ago
      Yeah, we'd only kill the disabled and mediocre children standing in the way of our Utopia, nothing immoral like those awful Chinese people do.
      - martin_a 4y ago
        We're talking about embryos here. I think you're well aware about the ongoing discussions on when those are to be considered humans and when not. That's not an easy topic, obviously, but I'm fairly confident that we won't throw babys in the garbage can if we don't like them but try to make those decisions as early as possible.
        telotortium 4y ago
        > I'm fairly confident that we won't throw babys in the garbage can if we don't like them Why not? What exactly is the limiting criterion? Sentience is the main criterion that people who want to argue for animal rights and yet support abortion use, and it's a pretty squishy criterion. Already Peter Singer supports veganism and effective altruism (i.e., rebranded utilitarianism), and yet is perfectly okay with both abortion and infanticide, at least until the child gets "sentience".
        timeon 4y ago
orbifold 4y ago
Europe has an aging population, which is obese, smokes and has heart problems. It is a dying continent whose boomer generation has decided to transfer large amounts of IP to China for a short term profit, while refusing to have children, protesting against the establishment and being generally useless in their youth. The millennials and gen-z is royally screwed, the writing has been on the walls for years.
- ahoka 4y ago
  Baby boomers refusing to have children? What?!
  - orbifold 4y ago
    Birth rates of children born during the baby boom (the baby boomers) is 2/3 to 1/2 of their parents generation.
    - spacemanmatt 4y ago
      So? Infant survival and life expectancy rates are also way up since their parents generation. You can't just throw around generational statistics without any context at all and call it valid.
- pvaldes 4y ago
  Fortunately we have a cure for this, an endless supply of young blood as immigrants. Europe has been a blender of races since the origin. And about "obese population", Europe is not so bad in fact. Obese people die younger and most elders in Europe are slim.
moonchrome 4y ago
Money is just one small aspect of it - getting into that kind of research probably requires >2σ IQ, then there's the affinity and motivation - you are left with a small pool of people who can do this work. By funding toy projects and pipe dreams you are crowding out useful research - and there's plenty of fundamental work in material sciences, superconductivity, etc. that could actually improve the lives of everyone
- alach11 4y ago
  It sounds like you're worried that creating high-paying fundamental science jobs would pull smart people away from engineering. But it would be more likely to pull smart people from zero-sum (or at least low-sum) fields like advertising and finance.
  - moonchrome 4y ago
    No - there's a lot of science to be done in these fields - it's just applied (ie. practical). When you fund "fundamental" research - you're not only diverting limited funds - you're diverting limited talent - so it's double crowding out.
nradov 4y ago
Much of Europe is now cranking up defense spending in order to deter future Russian aggression, and comply with NATO treaties. That will take precedence over big science projects for the next few years.
larryett 4y ago
The problem is western society doesn't really believe in science at this point to save us, it believes in technology. All our problems are just the engineering problem of AGI. Why waste money on something like this when AI will be "smarter" than us by the time it is built? We should just do nothing and wait for AI to build the instruments it wants. Maybe there is the slightest hope in this "overpriced" and long delayed space telescope that is getting ready right now but even with that the narrative will end up being how "AI finds alien planet" or "AI sees first star in the universe". To really build a new LHC it just needs to be marketed to the populace as a tool for AI research. Done. Everyone knows AI is the future and we are not so stupid to skimp on AI research funding. Spend all that money on researching particle physics though? What a fucking waste of money.
- gls2ro 4y ago
  How do you know that AGI can be reached? We dont know if we will ever reach AGI and if we want to theoretically demonstrate if we can reach it or not then we need to rely on science. Engineering alone cannot answer theoretical questions.
- runarberg 4y ago
  I’m not an expert on AI but I was under the impression that AI is just a fancy way to fit data with massive computative power. So if you wanted AI to do science for us it would basically just return the result we expected in a fancy and unexpected way, and even then we might be overfitting. If an AI would return new science we didn’t expect—I don’t see how but lets imagine—we would reject it as a miss. Take the Event Horizon Telescope as an example here. It requires a massive amount of computational modeling to create those images from a huge dataset. Humans did their science to figure out how the supermassive black holes would look like and created their models (AI if you will) based on this knowledge. Even so they are not free from criticism that they might be overfitting onto a conformation bias and many scientists are waiting for an independent confirmatory observation before they believe the image. Now if you replace the humans in that equation with more models (AGI if you will) how do you even know what you are looking at is even sensical? I’m not a fan of the LHC++ project either, but I think you might have too much faith in AI and AGI.
- 4y ago
pessimizer 4y ago
> That was basically the promise of the EU - peace through wealth - let's create some more. Doing useless science is the destruction of wealth. The destruction of wealth is pleasurable, don't get me wrong, but that's all it is. They could build gargantuan statues to do the same thing, or accumulate huge stockpiles of weapons.
- deely3 4y ago
  How did you know that this sciense is useless? What is the difference between building LHC+ and bringing people to the moon again?

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.

rendall 4y ago
Terrifying but intriguing idea. China's one-child policy led to widespread female infanticide and a generation of missing girls. What would prevent some similar unintended consequence in Europe?
- martin_a 4y ago
  > What would prevent some similar unintended consequence in Europe? We're not some fucked up dictatorship state?!?
  - dane-pgp 4y ago
    Yeah, we'd only kill the disabled and mediocre children standing in the way of our Utopia, nothing immoral like those awful Chinese people do.
    - martin_a 4y ago
      We're talking about embryos here. I think you're well aware about the ongoing discussions on when those are to be considered humans and when not. That's not an easy topic, obviously, but I'm fairly confident that we won't throw babys in the garbage can if we don't like them but try to make those decisions as early as possible.
      - telotortium 4y ago
        > I'm fairly confident that we won't throw babys in the garbage can if we don't like them Why not? What exactly is the limiting criterion? Sentience is the main criterion that people who want to argue for animal rights and yet support abortion use, and it's a pretty squishy criterion. Already Peter Singer supports veganism and effective altruism (i.e., rebranded utilitarianism), and yet is perfectly okay with both abortion and infanticide, at least until the child gets "sentience".
        timeon 4y ago

orbifold 4y ago

Europe has an aging population, which is obese, smokes and has heart problems. It is a dying continent whose boomer generation has decided to transfer large amounts of IP to China for a short term profit, while refusing to have children, protesting against the establishment and being generally useless in their youth. The millennials and gen-z is royally screwed, the writing has been on the walls for years.

ahoka 4y ago
Baby boomers refusing to have children? What?!
- orbifold 4y ago
  Birth rates of children born during the baby boom (the baby boomers) is 2/3 to 1/2 of their parents generation.
  - spacemanmatt 4y ago
    So? Infant survival and life expectancy rates are also way up since their parents generation. You can't just throw around generational statistics without any context at all and call it valid.
pvaldes 4y ago
Fortunately we have a cure for this, an endless supply of young blood as immigrants. Europe has been a blender of races since the origin. And about "obese population", Europe is not so bad in fact. Obese people die younger and most elders in Europe are slim.

moonchrome 4y ago

Money is just one small aspect of it - getting into that kind of research probably requires >2σ IQ, then there's the affinity and motivation - you are left with a small pool of people who can do this work. By funding toy projects and pipe dreams you are crowding out useful research - and there's plenty of fundamental work in material sciences, superconductivity, etc. that could actually improve the lives of everyone

alach11 4y ago
It sounds like you're worried that creating high-paying fundamental science jobs would pull smart people away from engineering. But it would be more likely to pull smart people from zero-sum (or at least low-sum) fields like advertising and finance.
- moonchrome 4y ago
  No - there's a lot of science to be done in these fields - it's just applied (ie. practical). When you fund "fundamental" research - you're not only diverting limited funds - you're diverting limited talent - so it's double crowding out.

nradov 4y ago

Much of Europe is now cranking up defense spending in order to deter future Russian aggression, and comply with NATO treaties. That will take precedence over big science projects for the next few years.

larryett 4y ago

The problem is western society doesn't really believe in science at this point to save us, it believes in technology. All our problems are just the engineering problem of AGI. Why waste money on something like this when AI will be "smarter" than us by the time it is built? We should just do nothing and wait for AI to build the instruments it wants. Maybe there is the slightest hope in this "overpriced" and long delayed space telescope that is getting ready right now but even with that the narrative will end up being how "AI finds alien planet" or "AI sees first star in the universe". To really build a new LHC it just needs to be marketed to the populace as a tool for AI research. Done. Everyone knows AI is the future and we are not so stupid to skimp on AI research funding. Spend all that money on researching particle physics though? What a fucking waste of money.

gls2ro 4y ago
How do you know that AGI can be reached? We dont know if we will ever reach AGI and if we want to theoretically demonstrate if we can reach it or not then we need to rely on science. Engineering alone cannot answer theoretical questions.
runarberg 4y ago
I’m not an expert on AI but I was under the impression that AI is just a fancy way to fit data with massive computative power. So if you wanted AI to do science for us it would basically just return the result we expected in a fancy and unexpected way, and even then we might be overfitting. If an AI would return new science we didn’t expect—I don’t see how but lets imagine—we would reject it as a miss. Take the Event Horizon Telescope as an example here. It requires a massive amount of computational modeling to create those images from a huge dataset. Humans did their science to figure out how the supermassive black holes would look like and created their models (AI if you will) based on this knowledge. Even so they are not free from criticism that they might be overfitting onto a conformation bias and many scientists are waiting for an independent confirmatory observation before they believe the image. Now if you replace the humans in that equation with more models (AGI if you will) how do you even know what you are looking at is even sensical? I’m not a fan of the LHC++ project either, but I think you might have too much faith in AI and AGI.
4y ago

pessimizer 4y ago

> That was basically the promise of the EU - peace through wealth - let's create some more. Doing useless science is the destruction of wealth. The destruction of wealth is pleasurable, don't get me wrong, but that's all it is. They could build gargantuan statues to do the same thing, or accumulate huge stockpiles of weapons.

deely3 4y ago
How did you know that this sciense is useless? What is the difference between building LHC+ and bringing people to the moon again?