[ffsm8]

No, but collaboration comes with a cost too.

As a European myself, I would prefer them to put less emphasis on collaboration and more on actually doing something's with the resources available to them and making that freely available. Collaboration will happen naturally and without having to coordinate.

But as they said, this is less about producing value then it's about signaling

[amarcheschi]

I don't get this. At the beginning of the press release they cite eurohpc. Before eurohpc, it was probably announced with a similar press release. And then it existed

[forty]

Collaboration brought us peace. Peace is underrated these days.

(NB: I mean the good kind of collaboration of course, on science and industry - it's a loaded word in French at least)

[pmontra]

I don't agree with that. We had two powers dividing Europe in two, placing their own armies all over the place and doinglg their best to convince the other party that the world would be destroyed if it dared to attack. That was what brought us peace. Collaboration in the form of the various European international organizations was a consequence.

Making another war in Europe was basically impossible. We had one in Yugoslavia which was not aligned with the two blocks and anyway only after the USSR lost the cold war.

[simion314]

The idea is that EU countries do not see themselves at rivals, this is very different then our entire history where everyone had an issue with their neighbors (there are exceptions of neighbors not having any conflicts). Most educated Europeans are now considering the entire EU as a similar culture and not want to start a fight to kill each other for some historical land, the exception are the uneducated or just low IQ people that fall for extreme nationalists that push for "Make our country a great empire again"

Your point is about the Cold War, nuclear weapons prevented nuclear alliances to attack each other, it did not prevent say two NATO non nuclear members to start conflicts.

[simion314]

So CERN and similar? you think it could have been done without any coordonation? Like 2 guys faking under they make it USA style ?

[wahnfrieden]

They mistake transparency for performativity, and secrecy for practicality

[ffsm8]

Well, what actual value did cern produce beyond theoretical research with no application in sight?

[jkaptur]

In case you're serious: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_World_Wide_Web

[greenavocado]

ARPANET and its successor TCP/IP already provided the fundamental networking infrastructure. Various hypertext systems were also being developed independently in and before the 1980s, like Ted Nelson's Xanadu project and Bill Atkinson's HyperCard. The key ideas of linked documents and markup languages were "in the air" so to speak. However, CERN provided some unique conditions that helped the WWW succeed where other systems didn't. It had an immediate practical need - helping physicists share information across institutions. It was developed in an open, non-commercial environment that encouraged sharing. CERN made the WWW technology freely available without royalties. The international nature of CERN helped drive early adoption across countries.

Without CERN, I think we would have eventually seen some form of hyperlinked document system emerge from either academia or industry, but it might have been more proprietary or fragmented.

[simion314]

And NASA? they just send robots in space to make pictures? Not sure why you are here and not on TikTok with such anti science ideology.

[rtsil]

Theoretical research in itself is one of the actual values. Any real-world application from CERN are purely incidental (albeit welcome).

The other values include redistribution of wealth, support for businesses, job creation, sustaining internal intellectual capabilities without depending on the whims of fickle corporations, and probably many others that I can't think of for now.

[ravetcofx]

Many things including New forms of cancer treatment https://home.cern/news/news/knowledge-sharing/fighting-cance...

[supermatt]

The web. Some people use that.