[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.