What's concerning to me, however, is the attitude towards curiosity that this article exhibits. They should rename their domain to smallthink.com.
More realistically : we can only build one car in the entire world, where a tiny minority of people can even understand the potential benefit, and anything they see will be completely useless for everyone else in day to day life because we need a civilisation level effort to even detect the implications of their theory. If their theory had some real world implications - you wouldn't need this car.
And this is expected to be funded by everyone. It's the modern equivalent of building pyramids.
Let's think big indeed, the author unfortunately has a very reductive vision for the future.
Instead how about:
A renaissance of funding - BIG SCIENCE - education, jobs.
That was basically the promise of the EU - peace through wealth - let's create some more.
Let's bring back the excitement and scientific wonder of the 1960s. This could be a unilateral vision across the democratic spectrum (everyone wants wealth).
And yes, global warming actually should dictate no less. Let's do it now.
Oh and let's just fix poverty while we are at it.
Again, Europe has the means and could do all of that by itself.
Doing useless science is the destruction of wealth. The destruction of wealth is pleasurable, don't get me wrong, but that's all it is. They could build gargantuan statues to do the same thing, or accumulate huge stockpiles of weapons.
You know what would be an awesome big science project that would immeasurably improve future people's lives? Sequencing all genes and using that data provide free embryo selection services to everyone who wants to be a parent.
Would probably cost the same as that giant particle smasher and but unlike the giant ring it would pay for itself in a generation.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_...
"Instead of cutting this program, just have every military cut funding at once" is not a very realistic path forwards, and we're not going to get the program funded on stuff like that.
In the hypothetical universe we're in here, where we have to convince people now.
1. https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection
2. https://www.geneticsandsociety.org/biopolitical-times/first-...
We're not some fucked up dictatorship state?!?
- Every prosperous and civilized nation's last words
Democracy as in free election ? Perfect democracy here - one party won twice, other parties lost. You call it a problem ?
Democracy as in free speech ? Dude ! Wake up ! In Poland is so much free speech that it's boarding with anarchy ! Eg. almost decade of opposition internally and internationally literally urges to harm their own country just to retake power - without any gov punishment or something. Mrs. Merkel ex-pet, Tusk, literally calls for purges, without any law procedures ! Freedom bordered with anarchy !
Maybe you are aware judges here act as caste and they do whatever they want. Law is twisted at will here. Do not saying all the time, just when they want it. And that judges are official* opposition of elected party ! Judges ! Acting politically ! You call that despotism ? Or too much freedom ?
Do we have military state like in France ? No. Do we have censorship like in Germany ? No. Do we have problems with making government like Italy ? No. Do our PM resigned because of corruption and next PM promised silence and no more leeks like in GB ? No.
You see ? It's oasis of peace and happiness here compared to rest of the EU ;)
But tell me pls, what you have in mind about that "anti-democracy" in Poland ?
They're saying anti-democratic behavior is being punished, which implies that Poland is pro-democracy.
Etc, etc.
You will have to be more specific, "democratic" is a grossly overlaoded term these days. When you write "democratic", do you mean "in accordance with the will of the majority of the population", or do you mean "in accordance with the will of unelected EU bureaucrats, the US Department of State, and media elites"?
Why not? What exactly is the limiting criterion? Sentience is the main criterion that people who want to argue for animal rights and yet support abortion use, and it's a pretty squishy criterion. Already Peter Singer supports veganism and effective altruism (i.e., rebranded utilitarianism), and yet is perfectly okay with both abortion and infanticide, at least until the child gets "sentience".
From Wikipedia: "A child (plural children) is a human being between the stages of birth and puberty [...]"
You are also conflating the abortion of an embryo with murder; only human persons can be murdered, embryos are not persons, therefore no murder.
I sincerely ask you to cut down the polemics here on HN. It does not lead to fruitful (no pun intended) discussions.
> an embryo is not a child and you cannot murder an embryo
It is not obviously and axiomatically true that embryos are not human (I'm assuming the previous comment meant human and not child). Many people think that they are, which is the source of the disagreement. It probably is fruitless to have this conversation on HN, but you shouldn't just assert the opposing position as if it were settled when it is anything but.
I beg to differ. I don't think that using dictionary definitions to make ones arguments can be counted as polemic (as in; to use contentious rhetoric). I might be wrong though.
> I'm assuming the previous comment meant human and not child
No, I actually meant 'child'. An human embryo is - obviously - human. No discussion about that. A human embryo is not a child - the definition of that is also pretty much settled, I'd say. (At least from a scientific point of view.)
But maybe I didn't clearly state my case, thus the misunderstanding.
The point I'm making is as follows. Embryos are not children and thus they are not persons. Just as I cannot murder my toe (it might be human, but it's not a person) I cannot murder an embryo.
To suggest there is only one definition of "child" is even more incorrect than suggesting that it can't refer to an unborn person:
Definition of child
…
3 a : an unborn or recently born person
"… Meghan Markle, married Prince Harry, now pregnant with child."
You also don't have any definition with a clear line when this switch from non human to human happens.
It almost always boils down to "when it's convenient for me"
Quotation needed. Outside of religious circles there's very little debate about this. Scientific consensus is that fetal viability is considered to begin at 23 or 24 weeks gestational age. That's long after the embryo stage.
Just to make communication easier; are you aware that there's a difference between embryo and fetus?
> You also don't have any definition with a clear line when this switch from non human to human happens.
I never proposed that a embryo is not human. But we can talk about the line dividing persons from non-persons, if you like.
> Outside of religious circles there's very little debate about this
Do you live in the US or Canada? Almost every other country, including almost all of highly secular Western Europe, bans abortion before at no later than 17 weeks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_law).
The importance of the topic doesn't make it impossible to be polemic. I can talk about a very serious topic and be polemic and I can also talk about a trivial matter and not be polemic. The question of polemic is decided by contentious rhetoric.
Equating embryos with children and abortion with murder is polemic.
I don't think it is polemic to disagree on this point, but it rationally follows that if embryos are unique life forms, which are also human, then aborting them is murder.
Personally, I don't agree with that line of reasoning either, but the argument isn't in itself polemic.
Edit: I suppose I should add that I am not treating "human" as a collective noun, the way we might talk about bread or water. "A human" is not merely a little toe, for example.
> The question is not are embryos human, the question is whether they are independent human life with their own rights.
I think we are pretty much in agreement what the contention is about.
> [..] the argument isn't in itself polemic.
The argument itself is not polemic. No argument in itself is polemic. Polemic is defined in the language used. I'm objecting the language in which the argument is phrased;
To quote the post I originally answered to:
> "Embryo selection"—is that a euphemism for "murdering any unborn child [...]
The phrasing is polemic for reasons I pointed out before.
All our problems are just the engineering problem of AGI. Why waste money on something like this when AI will be "smarter" than us by the time it is built?
We should just do nothing and wait for AI to build the instruments it wants.
Maybe there is the slightest hope in this "overpriced" and long delayed space telescope that is getting ready right now but even with that the narrative will end up being how "AI finds alien planet" or "AI sees first star in the universe".
To really build a new LHC it just needs to be marketed to the populace as a tool for AI research. Done. Everyone knows AI is the future and we are not so stupid to skimp on AI research funding.
Spend all that money on researching particle physics though? What a fucking waste of money.
Take the Event Horizon Telescope as an example here. It requires a massive amount of computational modeling to create those images from a huge dataset. Humans did their science to figure out how the supermassive black holes would look like and created their models (AI if you will) based on this knowledge. Even so they are not free from criticism that they might be overfitting onto a conformation bias and many scientists are waiting for an independent confirmatory observation before they believe the image. Now if you replace the humans in that equation with more models (AGI if you will) how do you even know what you are looking at is even sensical?
I’m not a fan of the LHC++ project either, but I think you might have too much faith in AI and AGI.
We dont know if we will ever reach AGI and if we want to theoretically demonstrate if we can reach it or not then we need to rely on science.
Engineering alone cannot answer theoretical questions.
I'm afraid - not even in technology at this point.
By funding toy projects and pipe dreams you are crowding out useful research - and there's plenty of fundamental work in material sciences, superconductivity, etc. that could actually improve the lives of everyone
Let's do that again. It was at least a lot more multi-disciplinary than an atom-smasher.
The millennials and gen-z is royally screwed, the writing has been on the walls for years.
And about "obese population", Europe is not so bad in fact. Obese people die younger and most elders in Europe are slim.
We're talking about using everybody's money for these science projects. And this is not money that's voluntarily given, it's taken.
Literally the only thing they can do at ISS, not better done with robots, is study how human bodies are affected by exposure to high radiation and long-term weightlessness. Which we care about only because people would be so exposed in ISS-like cans.
Now they are pushing the "lunar gateway", that likewise has exactly one reason to exist: SLS could get there. And, it will be a place for SLS to get to. And, even more useless. A thing in high orbit around the moon is absolutely useless for any other purpose, whether you are heading for the moon or beyond it.
ISS wasn't useless, but its successor should be much cheaper. We absolutely need to find ways how to do space research more efficiently, otherwise it will stay a luxury of the richest nations.
Fortunately, at the very least, launch costs to orbit are dropping and we may hope for further drops in the future - if Starship works as intended.
I wish it was true, it would be much easier to convince people to have ten of them.
It seems like the car is a Bugatti Veyron and like there is a huge (exponentially growing) fronteir to explore. Exploring another 1000 miles in a very well studied direction seems less curious than pushing outward another mile over the entire frontier. Especially at the places that have gotten less attention.
'Doing more of the same but bigger' feels more like small thinking than 'lets try lots of things we haven't tried before'. To me the latter also feels a lot more curious.
Why is it zero sum to begin with? And more importantly, how less effective would be able to feed the world had we had no space race to begin with? If we were still at a 1950s technical level, our farming capacity would be exponentially lower, and most of the big leaps came as a direct result technologies originally developed for space.
It's naive to assume we can see all the benefits of daring to attempt hard things, but attempting hard things is what moves society forward. If all we did was lots of little cars in all directions when we have already figured out the challenges with little cars, mean the ONLY benefit is the direct one. If we've never built a car to explore REALLY far, well, there's a bunch of other problems we need to solve to get there. And honestly, it's those results that will likely move the needle.
Big science projects such as the LHC go very far and very deep in the very fabric of reality. Instead of building a thousand cars, it'd be a good idea to still build the next space probe while, at the same time, use what we learned building the previous one to build a couple cars to explore in different directions.
You wouldn't go to the north pole with a VW Beetle.
Same thing applies here, smaller cars that explore in all direction can probably find a local maxima and get stuck there.
$100,000,000,000 with afterthought of “sure lets see if we can do it less expensively *since its sooo annoying to some people”? Where is the line for you currently?
My read of the article was more a call for considering the practical uses of tge research. If we don't know what $100B worth of LHC will discover, why wouldnt we instead fund tens of thousands of smaller projects that often have very practical real world goals?
"Making a car is expensive, so let's not do that to explore 1000 miles out. Let's instead build an airplane."
The problem with next-gen LHC is that there are no guarantees of any new or interesting physics for that $100 billion. And particle accelerators are not the only way to spend large sums of money, so there is an opportunity cost. Why not spend that $100 billion to build more space telescopes or more sensitive LIGOs to detect gravitational waves, etc.
It appears we suspect there is a better way.
I don't think that's quite right. The big problem isn't that there is 'nothing left to discover' because we know there are interesting physics at higher energy scales. What we don't actually know if there is anything interesting at the energy scales that this particle accelerator could achieve. You could literally spend two decades building this, and in the end, all you would do is rule out a tiny energy-scale slice.
From the people who brought you compost fueled cars?