Guys, the trick is to get it partially built and then cancel funding. Then scientists will never trust you to fund anything ever again, and you get to act like science is a waste of money while you're spending ridiculous sums on fighter jets.
I would have loved for the SSSC to have been built as well. It probably wouldn't have found the highs boson till 2010 or maybe as early as 2009. The computer technology of the 90s would have severely limited the things ability to be understood. CERN creates GB of data per second. I can't imagine what that thing would have done, and then we need to be able to process that much so we can filter out the noise.
I was 12 when it was announced that they weren't gonna finish buildt it, and even though I was just a kid in IN, something shattered for me that day. That was almost as bad as watching Challenger.
That project put my dad out of business. Government gave him (part of) the contract, he did a bunch of work for years and then poof, project gone, not gonna pay you for it.
I'm just amazed that funding $22 billion is even an issue when the project is being backed by the EU, and partially the US, since we never built ours....
The feds give the states more than $16b per year to build and run shitty, custom made IT systems for their Medicaid programs. It's basically a subsidy to IT companies. There are thousands of examples like this, where spending money on fundamental science is clearly a better investment.
i hope someday we construct a collider that spans the entire circumference of the earth. But we'd probably have to build one that spans the circumference of the moon first, and then maybe mars, since the oceans are going to be a bit of a doozie to work around that we don't have the technology for, whereas the interior of a collider is supposed to be evacuated, so, the moon almost kinda already handles that for us. heat might be an issue of course, but if we can figure out thermal radiator panels that can dump the heat straight into space, maybe we could pull it off...
mars would address the heat issues, but those dust storms are no joke and the dust itself is microscopic toxic/caustic razors and it'll try to get in everywhere and ruin fine instruments it touches. Moon dust is also really bad but there's no wind to kick it up on the moon obviously...
but damn. DAMN. imagine the fucking science we could get done with a LUNAR-SCALE PARTICLE COLLIDER!!!
Now I'm imagining placing a ring of gigantic dyson-sphere powered magnets in an intergalactic void to create the final and ultimate supercollider, the size of a galactic supercluster
that would legitimately be so fucking cool, but I think at those scales we're actually encroaching on things that truly are physically impossible. If it takes light entire geological eras to move through such a system, any hope of maintaining physical integrity throughout its length is ... exceedingly unlikely. Like, at ranges THAT vast, pretty sure the expansion of spacetime itself would rip it open...
There's probably opportunity to do some really large colliders in space, for much cheaper than on any celestial body.
But then, people are having a really hard time imagining the fucking science we could get done with a lunar-scale particle collider. That's why the merely 100km one isn't getting any money.
The Moon’s daytime is half a month long and can reach 120 C so we’d need some pretty powerful heat shielding. And there’s no ozone layer to protect the electronics from radiation, and I’m pretty sure the Moon orbits outside of Earth’s magnetosphere. And the shielding used for such a project could also be used to fix climate change here (and terraform Venus later) with orbital parasols. And whatever unimaginable technology we’d need for such an ambitious project may as well be used to run a grid of electromagnets and power lines across Mars to give it a magnetic field
At the energies involved, it's akin to a bacteria interfering with a supersonic goods train. The only bit that needs shielding is the detector systems, and that's not THAT hard to do in space. At least if you're at the point of building a space based accelerator.
Fun fact, they were going to build one in the US crossing the borders of LA, TX, AR. They even dug out the damn hole, but they shit canned the whole project so now we're just left with a random giant circular hole underground.
Edited AK to AR. That would have been a bit excessive.
Thanks for clearing that up, I thought I was finished or near completion. Glad they decided to stop production when they did but sucks that we didn't get it.
Imagine if only 1/10 of all countries GDP gouvernement spending went to scientists and the patent bullshit didn't exist ? We'd be mining asteroids and sipping coffee on Mars.
Would be neat if they found a way to only spend like 200 billion a year (the GDP of Hungary and as much as the second biggest military spender) on the people grinder.
Venus would take longer, but would be vastly easier to terraform to a habitable world. The atmosphere should be able to be transformed into an earth like atmosphere by dumping a few comets and some bacteria in. Might take the bacteria a few thousand years, but they did it here in Earth caused the first mass extinction.
We might wanna check to see if any bacteria exist on Venus first, but honestly if there are, they haven't made the evolutionary jump in the last 4 billion years, so I doubt it will happen just cause we add the necessary water.
While we are at it, we may as well solve the dark forest problem, turn the solar system into a massive spaceship, and extend the life of our sun, by turning Mercury into a solar thruster/ star lifter.
I'm partial to the idea of converting Mercury into a star lifter / thruster / planetary shade. Blocking sunlight to Venus would cause the atmosphere to cool, then freeze and fall as snow. Then you can disassemble Venus too for more raw material. That's a massive store of carbon, oxygen, and sulfur. Solar powered mass drivers operating out of a planetary vacuum cut costs of launching material into space.
People often object to the idea because we can't afford it, it's too difficult, or out of concern for preserving those planets. Yeah, we won't be doing all that. It will be our descendants in the far future. A task for new civilizations, over eons. Discovering life on Mercury and Venus is a long shot. But if it is there, it's doomed without human intervention. Convert those two planets to Dyson swarm, and they'll have matter for countless orbital habitats, not just for whoever humans evolve into, but for nature preserves too.
I'm not seeing why the same couldn't be said for Mars, drop some mold spores and water bears down there, maybe some photosynthetic bacteria, slowly build a blanket of CO2 to warm the planet, melt/release the water from the surface, a thousand years gives a habitable planet, no asteroid steering required.
It's currently used to monopolize important discoveries and technologies. The Huawei debacle is the biggest proof. No country should be able to control another's technological advance based on weither they're friends with them at the moment or not. Also, it's not like big tech stealing from small/medium enterprise never happens. Either they just buy the company or strangle it one way or another to bankrupt it and then buy it for cheap.
When I look at the inability to fund big science projects like this, I'm reminded of the most fictional thing to ever happen in a science fiction movie.
The film? Contact.
They build a giant portal machine thing.
Gets blowed up by terrorists.
But that's okay, because they've got another one!
What?
Yep!
"Why build one when you can build two for twice the price?"
Yeah everything's been kinda fucked ever since, hasn't it... i mean... it was 2008 right before obama being elected and i really don't think the "correct" path of the future would have involved r-money or mccain winning so at least SOME shit would be the same, but still...
LHC didn't start seriously smashing shit (beyond previous energies done by other colliders) until after 2010 though. I think everything went tits up about 2012, tbh - the year they found the Higgs Boson. I kind-of jokingly subscribe to the idea that the world ended. I mean, it just checks so many boxes to me, it truly seems that the universe as it stands right now is fundamentally different than it should be after the passing of one single decade.
If it works like telescopes, the Very Large Hadron Collider, then the Extremely Large Hadron Collider, and then the Overwhelmingly Large Hadron Collider.
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.
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.
Off the top of my head, I can't think of any advance that didn't at some point depend on people just dicking around to see what they could see.
"What happens if we spin this stick really really fast against this other stick?"
"Cool! What happens if we put some dried moss around it?"
"That's nuts, man! Hey, I wonder what happens if we toss some of our leftovers in there?"
"C'mon over here, guys. You gotta taste this!"
At worst, a project like this keeps a lot of curious people in one place where we can make sure they don't cause harm with their explorations. At best, whole new industries are founded. Never forget that modern electronics would never have existed without Einstein and Bohr arguing over the behaviour of subatomic particles.
Say the actual construction cost is $100 billion over 10 years and operational costs are $1 billion a year. Compared to all the stupid and useless stuff we already spend money on, that's little more than pocket lint. We could extract that much from the spending of one military alliance and it would look like a rounding error. Hell, we could add one cent to the price of each litre of soft drinks, alcoholic beverages, and bottled water and have money left over.
Yeah, but you could also fund a lot of other research with this budget. The point is, physicists just don't know, if there are more particles existing. There is no theoretical theory there predicting particles at a certain mass with certain decay channels. They won't know what to look for. That's actually already a problem for the LHC. They have this huge amount of data, but when you don't know, what kind of exotic particles you are looking for and how they behave, you can't post-process the data accordingly. They are hidden under a massive amounts of particles, that are known already.
Has the LHC resulted in any kind of tangible returns on investment so far? I know they proved the existence of the Higgs Boson, but all that did as I understand it was verify what we were already pretty sure of.
I'm just having a hard time understanding why we can't blow 30 or 100 billion or whatever on something else like fusion research. Or just something with a more concrete "if we pull this off it solves " kinda prospect.
I understand science can walk and chew gum at the same time, but this in particular seems like a shitload to spend and a lot of land to disturb so that particle physicists can nerd out in an underground torus proving theories but maybe not moving the needle much for mankind.
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.
Easy. When scientists come up with a verifiable theory that explains observed gravitational effects in the universe that can't be explained by general relativity, given visible matter.
When you admit that night time doesn't exist simply because you're not there to observe it while you sleep. We know somethings there. We know there's matter that isn't adding up. We just don't know what it is.