[SkyBelow]

What are the alternatives? Better weapons, better ad targeting systems, better gambling hidden behind a veneer of gaming on mobile? We can look at where our government and our society currently allocates money and find that the allocations looks bad enough that even building a bigger particle accelerator that might not find anything is an improvement overall. As a singular species, I think we would be better for going down that route given the average of what would be given up.

Problem is that humanity is not unified for our own betterment, so that ends up being a bad metric to judge actions upon. I think you are right in the outcome, it would mean losing influence, and even if we get funding it'll likely be diverted from the areas we least want it diverted from. You're probably right and I find that unsatisfactory.

[jerf]

Sorry, are you seriously proposing that either we fund new particle accelerators or we're just going to build weapons/ads/gambling systems, and there are no other choices?

I want to be clear that this is your claim before I spend any more time on it.

[SkyBelow]

No. I'm pointing out that our current system is already spending money on far more wasteful things, thus it should be possible to fund accelerators by taking away from the things that are an outright detriment to humanity than the things that are, at worst, only useless.

I even point out that the reality is likely if we fund particle accelerators, it will likely be diverted from places we don't want it to be diverted from, like other research spending.

>even if we get funding it'll likely be diverted from the areas we least want it diverted from

Note I even end by saying the poster is probably right, for as much as I don't like that they are (not meant as a negative to the poster, but to how humanity currently allocates our resources).

[arcticfox]

Unfortunately the "weapons are a waste" opinion has taken a severe hit since February.

[weego]

That feels like a false dichotomy.

This is pushing forward research into theory, even with highly positive results it's completely unknown whether any of those results actually result in any progress for the human race other than knowledge, and at a base cost of €21 billion that knowledge comes with a huge opportunity cost.

We face so many tangible risks right now that €21 billion invested elsewhere into things that will likely produce meaningful advances to our problems that the question of 'is spending this much money disproving philosophical arguments justifiable right now?' should rightly be being asked.

[SkyBelow]

Isn't the false dichotomy that if we spend €21 billion on a particle accelerator then we must take it from other research into advancing humanity instead of taking it from other areas that don't provide benefit to humanity as a whole (though they do provide benefit to some groups at equal or greater cost to others).

>'is spending this much money disproving philosophical arguments justifiable right now?' should rightly be being asked.

In light of all the expenditures we are already making elsewhere, I don't see how many of those can be justified but this one not.

[bluGill]

Okay, we need to take that money from somewhere. There is only so much labor on the planet, and that is what the money is buying in the end. (I'm including corruption in labor here) Some labor is more valuable than others, and we can debate how much we want to spend, but in the end if we have someone do X they could do Y instead. Sometimes Y is sit around doing nothing, sometimes it is valuable.

The problem here is we don't know what will be discovered and if it will be useful. Cheap Science Fiction FTL without all the time dilation - very valuable. Add half a decimal point to our models - probably can't be used for anything and so less valuable than a game. I have no idea, I just picked unlikely two extremes.

[louloulou]

Better to just create trillions out of nothing and use them to buy financial assets, now that's a good use of money!

(https://www.ecb.europa.eu/mopo/implement/app/html/index.en.h...)

[bluGill]

false dichotomy.

Just because you can name some other bad use of money that we do doesn't make some other one good.

[louloulou]

You're talking about opportunity costs - it's not a false dichotomy at all. Spending trillions on financial assets mean they are not spent on other things.

[R0b0t1]

Well, if you spend the 21 billion on health research and life extension, you can live to see spending 21 billion on physics research.

[supportengineer]

Huge fleets of space telescopes

Multiple gravity wave detectors

[Koshkin]

These I'm afraid will only confirm what we already know.

[simne]

Really? What about quark stars/planets, long bursts?

-Telescopes gives us lot of confirmations, but also they, especially largest, constantly feed us data about new, unknown things.