Where would the US be after twenty years of that instead of spending it on military?
People think this idea is crazy, but if I were in charge, I'd keep a small but efficient force that can be scaled up and down quickly for dealing with Iraq or Iran scale enemies, and rely solely on nuclear weapons for defending against hostile superpowers - which is how any superpower conflict is likely to end anyway.
Yeah, you can't play the imperialism game like that, but it doesn't seem worth the cost anyway.
Can you present an argument for how a new super-collider is actually useful?
While I agree this is a huge expense, I do question the slippery slope of attacking research budgets. I wish more nations chalked this up as the 'cost of doing business'. Cutting research funding works well for election cycles, but doesn't do much for the folks down the road.
That makes sense, but you must also have a framework that tells you when something is just too much. It looks like you are comfortable with €21 BN, would €210 BN be also ok, or €2.1 TN or €21 TN? Which level does not justify the knowledge gain?
Fundamental knowledge is valuable, but in a world with finite resources you must always be able to compare with other valuable alternatives. Should we, the humankind, invest a few tens of billions into chasing hypothetical superpartner particles? Or we should invest in the ARC fusion reactor [1], that might help us cut down our greenhouse gas emissions in 20 years?
One could perhaps get those benefits through more direct means for less, but if not then it would make the collider technically useful.
Just like military R&D. So what's the point of the comparison?
While the collider cost is one-time.
[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2012/07/05/how-much-d...
As it is, the supercollider money comes from the limited science budget, and buying the one thing means we can't have the other.
Things need to stand on their own if they are worth. Removing the military is not politically viable, so we can come up with 1000s of fantasy project we could finance.
However, the problem remains the same, what is the alternative use for those 21 billion. No matter if you can use the military budget, in that case you also need to evaluate alternative uses for those 21 billions.
[1] https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/USNuclearModernizatio...
It has been money well spent, but I agree with you and President Trump that we should be bringing the troops home not wasting money and lives on endless wars overseas.
Many of the key advancements were made with military funding, but: A) the fact that the military did it first doesn't mean that somebody else wouldn't have done it a year or ten later. B) how much did we waste on our main goal of murdering people, compared to the amount of funding necessary for helpful scientific advancements?
If we threw $700 billion a year at anything, we'd see major scientific advancements happening almost by accident. We could have invested it in agriculture, or infrastructure, health, or ending poverty. All of those would produce major first order benefits in addition to the advancement of science and technologies.
The technologies we got out of the space program are vast and while there was always a military aspect (there couldn't really not be given that the technology to put a satellite is basically an ICBM) a lot of the technology had civilian applications.