[snowwrestler]

In the scope of international cooperation, tens of billions of dollars is not very much money. For context, the U.S. economy generates $10 billion every ~3 hours. One private company, Google, spends $10 billion in about 2 weeks.

So look at it this way. Let’s take a bunch of the smartest people alive, train them for decades, give them a month of Google money, and they’ll spend 30 years advancing engineering to probe the very fabric of reality. And everything they learn will be shared with the rest of humanity for free.

Sounds like a pretty good deal to me.

[WarmWash]

Takes like this are an optical illusion meant to create the idea that there is an insane amount of money freely floating around that is just being hoarded.

But just like that money is generated, it's also all spent.

So the actual hard part is deciding what not to spend money on so we can build some crazy physics machines with a blurry ROI instead.

[snowwrestler]

It’s not an optical illusion, there is actually is a large amount of money available to do things. This is all public data, you can check it yourself.

[aleph_minus_one]

> Let’s take a bunch of the smartest people alive, train them for decades, give them a month of Google money

Unpopular opinion: Google makes an insane amount of money, so they can afford this salary. The CERN (or whatever your favourite research institute is), on the other hand, is no money-printing machine.

[alphawhisky]

Every step towards understanding subatomic physics is a step towards cold fusion. The second we're able to understand and capture this energy, money literally doesn't exist. Infinite energy means infinite free energy, which would also abolish money from a fundamental market value perspective. I'll continually preach that we need to plan for this economically as a species because none of our current government or economic systems will survive the death of scarcity.

[bluGill]

> Every step towards understanding subatomic physics is a step towards cold fusion.

Is it?

You are assuming cold fusion is possible. We don't know that. It might be one more step before we finally prove it is never possible.

You are also assuming that cold fusion is something this path of research will lead us to. However this might be a misstep that isn't helpful at all because it doesn't prove anything useful about the as yet unknown physical process that cold fusion needs.

We just don't know, and cannot know at this point.

[llbbdd]

Unless cold fusion allows everyone to literally pull infinite energy out of thin air with no maintenance or labor costs, I don't buy that premise. Many other utilities are effectively free already in some places, but you still need metering to deter bad actors, which is what money is. Otherwise I'm going to take all available cold fusion capacity in existence and use it to build my own artificial sun with my face on it.

[aleph_minus_one]

> The second we're able to understand and capture this energy, money literally doesn't exist. Infinite energy means infinite free energy[.]

Similar statements were already claimed about nuclear fission power plants in the 70s.

[pixl97]

And your point is? Sometimes we make predictions that take hundreds of years to be turned into products.

[aleph_minus_one]

My point is that you shouldn't believe in marketing claims that are obviously too good to be true, like

> The second we're able to understand and capture this [cold fusion] energy, money literally doesn't exist. Infinite energy means infinite free energy, which would also abolish money from a fundamental market value perspective.

[pixl97]

I mean obviously this statement is false as we live in a finite section of the visible universe.

This said beyond the marketing there is a reality that if cold fusion did show up that there is a singularity event that occurs that making predictions past that point will almost always fail as the world would change very rapidly.