Budget: Military Complex > CERN
Long term value to citizens: CERN > Miltary Complex
All historical CERN expenses combined are a tiny fraction of the yearly expenses of the combined EU miltary
US Congress: Audit NASA > Audit the Pentagon
EU: Audit CERN > Audit Luxemborg/Malta/
UK
This is cheaper than two super carriers.
Yeah, but how many brown children can it kill?
I’d rather spend 22 billion on this than in Israel or more weapons of war
…or another feeble scheme like the 5000th pitch for a “hyper loop”
Hyperloop was known high schooler nonsense from the start, at least this will get something back, whatever it is.
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…
… but i’m still enjoying imagining it :3
Does it actually have to maintain physical integrity as a single structure? If it’s not got a vacuum chamber due to relying on the ambient vacuum, then each section of magnets need not physically touch, so the individual components need only use some of the energy from their power source to actively steer themselves into formation rather than rely on material strength to hold together.
I would expect so on the basis of precision. At scales that large, space itself becomes an unreliable medium…
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
Most proposals for moon colonies are either built underground or covered up with a thick layer of regolith for both of the reasons you mentioned. It’s very likely a collider would also be built underground for the same reasons. Digging a many-miles-long tunnel on the moon with the awful properties of moon regolith to deal with would have its own set of challenges though.
Yeah. I hear NASA and India are planning to send 3d-printer robots to lava caves to seal them off, cover/get rid of all moon dust and build permanent bases there (but as of now the priority seems to be researching the polar water-ice and using moon rocks to study what the early solar system’s geology was like)
Linear collider to Proxima Centauri
Why do we need to do it around a planet? Origin of Halo confirmed
I think on earth is preferential, and you’d have to build it underground anyways in order to shield it from interference.
Even underground there is tons of issues. One for example is that the ground is having tides.
As the moon passes above is the ground is moving by several cm so it has to be compensated by the collider.
Remember when people were worried about these killing us all by creating a black hole that swallows the Earth?
Can this one just hurry up and do that please?
Imagine if only 1/10 of all countries
GDPgouvernement spending went to scientists and the patent bullshit didn’t exist ? We’d be mining asteroids and sipping coffee on Mars.We need this one to undo the timeline shift the last one caused
We need to get the divergence number above 1.
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…
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.
This article does a good job of arguing against it I think. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-world-doesnt-need-a-new-gigantic-particle-collider/
My mind isn’t made up on the topic, so like can anybody explain to me why this thing is actually worth 30+ billion dollars?
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.
Will this do?
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.
Yes, with finite resources, we have to make choices. As long as there are some resources for people to just poke around, I’m good with whatever. If we’re actually looking for some place to drop a few billion, I actually don’t think another collider should be on the list, let alone at the top.
The problem as I see it is that “but what good is it” is used to limit pretty much all fundamental research.
So why don’t they just use post processing to remove all the known particles and start looking at the particles that remain, discover a new one, remove it, continue until there’s none left?
There are multiple reasons for that. We don’t know the decay channels of already discovered particles precisely. So there might be very rare processes, that contribute to already known particles. It is all a statistical process. While you can give statements on a large number of events, it is nearly impossible to do it for one event. Most of the particles are very short-lived and won’t be visible themselves in a detector (especially neutral particles). Some will not interact with anything at all (neutrinos). Then your detectors are not 100% efficient, so you can’t detect all the energy, that was released in the interaction or the decay of a particle. The calorimeters, that are designed to completely stop any hadrons (particles consisting of quarks) have a layer of a very dense material, to force interactions, followed by a detector material. All the energy lost in the dense material is lost for the analysis. In the end you still know, how much energy was not detected, because you know the initial energy, but everything else gets calculated by models, that are based on known physics. A neutral weakly interacting particle would just be attributed as a neutrino.
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 thing is, that you can’t predict, what fundamental science will lead to. In the case of the LHC the tangible returns are technologies, that can be adapted to other fields, like detectors. There are enough other arguments, why a bigger accelerator is a bad idea, where you do not need to trash fundamental research as a whole.
You have any links to info on these technologies? I’ve done some googling today and in the past and come up with little specifics on the LHC gave us X or helped lead to the development of X that is now being used for Y.
And I’m not saying we need to trash research. Just that research could be done on things that more directly answer some of the very real problems we have right now before this planet goes up in flames. Building another even bigger more expensive collider seems really indulgent from where I’m sitting.
And we can agree to disagree. I’m not big mad they’re proposing this. I just don’t think it makes a lot of sense based on the information I have available.
These things are really special interest. They developed small scale particle detectors, that are nowadays used in medical physics for example (PET scanners and so on). Then their electronics need to be very insensitive to radiation damage, that is also important for everything space related. There is probably some R&D on superconducting magnets as well, that can be adapted to other purposes, but I am not too up to date in this field and I am not sure, if Cern is a major player there.
Thanks I appreciate some specifics. It’s pretty cloudy when I’ve looked into this myself.
I also think there are better places to put this kind of money, including on projects that we are certain have obvious potential to change the world for the better.
What I was getting at was the very idea that we absolutely have to know what the return is before we start. Just because we know the potential return doesn’t mean that it’s not research (as in your fusion example), but just because we can’t identify a return ahead of time doesn’t mean there won’t be one.
Also, I don’t know if there have been any tangible benefits from the LHC. Precision manufacturing? Improvements in large-scale, multi-jurisdiction project management? Data analytics techniques? More efficient superconducting magnets? I don’t know if those are actual side effects of the project and, if they are, I don’t know that the LHC was the only way to get them.
Edit: or, like the quantum physics underlying our electronics, maybe we won’t know for 50-100 years just how important that proof was.
Something something capitalism innovation
This is fundamental research, we never know what we are going to find.
But how will it be called? “Even larger Hadron Collider”?
QUARK
Quantum
Universe
Advanced
Research
Komplex!!
It literally says “Future Circular Collider” smh…
It will never get built, so the name is futureproof.
- shiveyarbles ( @shiveyarbles@beehaw.org ) English10•1 year ago
The next step… a human collider
Cars?
you mean the ufc?
A large hard-on collider!
Yes I know someone already made that joke:)
Hey, I think I’ve seen that porno before!
At least the first part, anyway. I never finished it…
Event Horizon?
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.
I thoroughly enjoyed this. Then I saw I already liked it. 15 years sounds short but it’s actually a decent amount of time.
I hope we can build one that can use hydrogen fusion like the sun; such an energy source would make an excellent power source, even if small
When do we admit that maybe Dark Matter just doesn’t exist?
Science bad
