If you need high energy, pure vacuums and ultra low temps, surely space is where such experiments should be conducted on bigger scales in future to push it further?
The fundamental problem is that collider physics relies on being able to create collisions of exactly known quantity as your input (eg in the LHC's case, proton-proton collisions at a 14TeV centre of mass energy). If you don't control the input, you can't extract any information about the output you detect, in the same way that you can't create a simulation of snooker by looking at the balls on the table, without knowing how they were set up before being hit.
The other problem is that to probe the frontier of particle physics, you need truly immense statistics to get enough of the incredibly rare collisions. Think bunches of hundreds of billions of protons colliding tens of millions of times per second. The upshot is that you'd not only need to build the detectors in space (which are thousands of tonnes with extremely precise electronics that need whole server farms plugged directly into them to process the terabits of data coming out each second), but you'd also need to build the entire collider in space too.
Even then it's a rather pointless endeavour, since the colliders require a colder temperature and higher vacuum than even interstellar space, nevermind within the solar system.
https://home.cern/science/engineering/cryogenics-low-tempera...
> The LHC's cryogenic system requires 40,000 leak-tight pipe seals, 40 MW of electricity – 10 times more than is needed to power a locomotive – and 120 tonnes of helium to keep the magnets at 1.9 K.
Launch cost per kg aside for the detectors and basic framework, space is the best place for pushing the boundaries of high energy physics experiments in the future.
In any case - how much of that $1000 is attributed to the research and development of the wheel in Ancient Mesopotamia?
How much is attributed to the discovery of electricity, and to General Relativity?
If we weren't attempting to get answers to fundamental questions we'd still be living in caves.
Are you actually interested in discussing the topic at hand?
My point is that all technology is built on prior discoveries and all matter of other factors that produce the civilisation, that produces doohickies, to look up cat memes.
I'm a nonexpert who has some vague idea of how these things work.
There's two kinds of accelerator: circular and linear. In either case, you have a tube, often underground, a bunch of accelerator components along the tube, and a detector component. I believe but I am not sure that a key advantage of the circular one is that you can accelerate the particles in the beam as they take multiple loops around the tube. The disadvantage is that when charged particles turn they lose energy by emitting electromagnetic radiation, and the whole point of the accelerator is to stuff these particles full of energy to make interesting collisions. This is mitigated by having higher-radius accelerators, which is the key reason we build things like the Large Hadron Collider and make it so very large in the first place, instead of just trying to add stronger stuff at existing accelerators.
So what do you intend to do in space?
The quasi-achievable near term might see a linear accelerator that consists of two components orbiting and firing particle beams into a third (the detector) because we are obviously not orbiting the mass of the LHC in the near term, and we're not orbiting anything that's rigid and also substantially larger than a rocket payload. It will no doubt be tricky to align the beams, as the orbits are ellipses and the beams need to be approximately straight lines (or close enough, blah blah spacetime). But the fundamental problem is that you're going to need to do all your acceleration all at once, at the accelerators, which immediately negates any possible advantages you could possibly have from space.
Perhaps you could do something very clever with an orbit-sized circular accelerator with accelerators spaced at intervals around the planet. You'd need a lot of launches of some intense equipment (I believe the Earth-based accelerator components are giant supercooled magnets). You'd also need an energy source, lots of engineering prowess to get everything in good working order (LHC bringup was very hands-on) except any adjustments will have to be done in orbit, and then when it's running you'd face the problem of LOLmaintenance.
I'm going to be honest, I'm more skeptical about this than about the Mars colony.