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Comment by kgwgk | Hacker News Reader

> One military plane

To be fair, that budget is for 2500 planes and their maintenance over 50 years.

And it's compared to the budget of all costs for the development, building, maintenance and running of a single and unique LHC. Whereas the costs for producing 2500 planes are spread to all of them. Nevertheless the total LHC budget is a cost of mere 15 of the said series of 2500 units. The cost per unit of the whole series is 600 millions per unit! It's quite obvious something is wrong in these investments.

But the real science (especially to observe the Earth, the climate and the effects of global warming) struggles for breadcrumbs or even for pure survival. Because ideology, not rational thinking.

Still, the difference in potential outcomes for humanity are substantial. For sure one will only ever achieve blowing up someone with better precision than before... how exiting!

F-35 isn't for blowing things up, it's for deterring war. Fat good your particle accelerators do if thet constant get blown up in war.

Deterring war is the greatest way to unlock human prosperity.

And killing with precision means saving lives, the greatest good in the world.

Do you believe that? All that kind of investment does is keep the war machine spinning, and the U.S. will continue to keep the world a violent place.

Investing in healthcare, education, and infrastructure on a global scale would a) be possible with that kind of budget and b) do a lot more to prevent war, since there would be a whole lot less to fight about.

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