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Comment by crote | Hacker News Reader

You could use the same argument to justify spending $1B on searching for the Loch Ness Monster. The problem is, you can only spend money once. If you're spending $1B on the FCC you aren't spending that same $1B on all kinds of other research.

With the LHC there was a very clear goal: verify the Standard Model and prove (or disprove) the existence of the Higgs boson - and hopefully discover some unexpected stuff along the way. On the other hand, the FCC is mainly a shot in the dark: they aren't validating a widely-accepted theory, they are just hoping that if you spend enough money on a bigger collider something interesting will fall out.

Most research gives you at least some insight. With the FCC there is a very real possibility that the insight will be "our $20B collider found absolutely nothing, now give us $1T to build an even bigger one". Sure, funding research is a long shot, but at a certain point you're just setting money on fire.

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I see your point, but thats a really bad comparison. We are pretty certain that there is no giant dinosaur in a lake, but in terms of fundamental research there is a lot we cannot really explain a great many things. We dont even know if we are "looking" correctly, with the right concept in mind.

I agree that money spending must be carefully considered, but for this research there really is no replacement. You can shuffle public spending around, but an Experiment not dont will explain no part of the Universe. If the countries and Supranationals that are able to dont fund them we will be stuck with what we know now until they do.

It is a lot of money, but it is also the only way. Does that meaningfully stop the EU and all others from doing their thing? I would argue no. We can still afford it and so we should.

It's not necessarily a "waste of money," but it's certainly highly deceptive. For example, China has built a large number of unprofitable infrastructure projects and abandoned projects over the past two decades. Even though they lost money, the waste during construction still made China the world's second-largest economy and aroused envy among some ignorant right-wingers. However, this cost has overdrawn the resources for the next few decades. It has caused China's fertility rate to fall below 1, meaning there won't be enough population to repay this debt in the future, let alone enough money for maintenance (even though many of these facilities were never economically viable to begin with). China's bankruptcy is only a matter of time. Moreover, China owes not only economic debt, but also significant "cultural debt" and "civilizational debt." The Chinese government and society's attempt to raise money through illegal means and extortion by issuing "cultural debt" and "civilizational debt" will undoubtedly result in another collapse.

That's not true. There are a huge number of theories that would be falsified by a more precise measurement of the Higgs mass.

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