this post was submitted on 08 Nov 2023
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Science Memes

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[–] FlyingSquid 18 points 1 year ago

Maybe they should do a Kickstarter.

[–] Sylvartas 10 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (17 children)

I'm pretty bullish on science investments, but I've heard multiple arguments that this thing is probably not worth the money. The most prevalent argument I've heard to the contrary is basically "we could discover something that might be interesting." But like very little in terms of concrete measurable returns on investment for it.

This article does a good job of arguing against it I think. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-world-doesnt-need-a-new-gigantic-particle-collider/

My mind isn't made up on the topic, so like can anybody explain to me why this thing is actually worth 30+ billion dollars?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

If they already knew the intended results it wouldn't make sense to do it. Science of this kind is like "here's something we haven't tried yet", which itself is pretty difficult to even come up with.

Also, money spend on something like this doesn't just disappear. It goes around the suppliers doing it and returns to the state eventually. Of course someone will pocket some money but when talking billions it's more of an investment in the area than a cost or even an investment in the actual collider. A used collider isn't worth that amount of money , so where'd it go? It didn't disappear. Money goes round.

It creates a lot of jobs and when looking at the entire supply chain, it feeds a hell of a lot of people, even if the scientific result is "oh well it didn't do anything at all." That way, it might be cheaper than supplying social security/basic income for that amount of people.

At the end of the day, in the grand economic scale, we're all riding on the shoulders of whoever digs out the the resources from the Earth, so we need to make these kind of very important projects to make it appear as if everyone else is actually producing anything at all. The science is just a nice side effect.

Will this do?

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The fact they are suggesting 100km in circumference tells me that the size of this thing was not planned based on scientific research, but they wanted an easy, big number. That being said, go science! I'm all for additional research, provided they don't explode our planet, as I would be mildly upset if they did that.

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