I think it is important to remember the context of the discussion. I think I it is completely reasonable, and not odd at all, to have a utilitarian view of science, when you are talking about spending $100 Billion.
So would you have cancelled the moon landing program? In 2020 dollars that program cost over $257B (over $400B if you count related programs and costs)[1], and that goal--landing humans on the moon--has demonstrated very little utility.
You don't need to put men on the surface of the moon to gain any of these benefits. The US government could've spent far less to achieve those same outcomes.
And that's ignoring the fact that, particularly regarding those "major dividends", much of those justifications can only be made in hindsight. At the time I think it would've been difficult to justify the moonshot on that kind of utilitarian basis.
https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/historic-speeches...
Keep it civil, please.
> The point of going to the moon was never to dimly increase utility to the public.
I think maybe you've lost the thread of the conversation?
The original claim was that scientific research/projects should be funded based on evident utility.
My point is that if you fund such projects purely based on immediately evident utility, then projects like Apollo (among many others) don't happen.
My unspoken corollary is that that would represent a loss to humanity, and that pure utilitarianism is too narrow a frame to use when assessing the value of a given project.
Honestly, I think we're in agreement, here, and I'm not sure I understand your aggressive response.
The world wide web which we are currently using was invented at CERN. You can literally go look at the proposal manuscript.
Suppose you have a city where windows never get broken. So there's no demand for glazing for a few years. So the glaziers all go out of business and move onto other things - they break down their machines and factories and repurpose them.
Then there's a minor earthquake and it breaks a lot of windows. But the cost to replace them is enormous - there's no glass making business anymore! What should have cost a few hundred dollars costs hundreds of thousands because the machines and people need to be built and retrained, and the quality for a few months is kind of bad as well.
What should the city have done? Well, one answer would be to break some windows regularly to keep at least one glazier operating. Or we could pay the glazier to make windows we don't use right now, or ask them to build better windows under government grant to keep them available and maybe come up with an improved window design...etc. etc. etc.
A machine on the scale of the LHC doesn't get made in a factory which makes LHCs. It gets made in literally tens of thousands of businesses, each of which services a big order for some type of precision part that's either within their capabilities or that they might believe can be accomplished if demanded. Once they can do that, that becomes the new thing that everyone else can now buy potentially.
So yes, sure - let's talk about added value, but when "choosing between alternatives" you need to have some actual, reasonable alternatives. The postulate here - build ITER instead for fusion power - is exactly the same sort of project. And the reality is we can and should do both.
We already had gopher. Web was an incremental step.
so the solution is obvious. spend all the physics money on healthcare (or fusion power) research institutions and hope for the best.
FTFY
Honestly, these are country budgets. That's not an insane amount of money. It is Germany spending $2bn/yr at the 5x inflated budget but $500m/yr at the estimated cost (23bn).