The Large Hadron Collider sets its sights on dark matter

Special Seminar: How to deal with the media: maximising opportunity and minimising threat / Pryce-Jones, Jessica (speaker) (Managing Director of the consultancy iOpener Ltd) ; Pillai, Nisha (speaker) (news anchor for BBC World)

This session will cover how to work effectively with the media including print, radio and TV. You'll get an insight into how journalists and news rooms operate and what they would like from you [...]

http://cds.cern.ch/record/1127343

Propaganda.

1: It's not that much $ and neurons, actually. We spend far more marketing lipstick and selling mobile games. If your priority is to reduce wasted spending, there are far worse candidates.

2: Original science and research has consistently yielded some of the biggest game-changers in technology (and subsequently, human well-being) than anything else. Libraries, electricity, the Internet, all of those felt like frivolous indulgences when they were starting out.

3: Projects like these are exploratory, which makes them inspiring. People are curious and eager to learn. This puts a pressure on the educational pipeline. People become scientists to learn answers to these questions. They use these skillsets for other things as well. I recommend listening to Neil Tyson talking about space: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUbOjZWjTLU

I agree that our impending ecological doom is an issue. If you want to get into the psychology of it- people simply don't feel the pinch yet. It seems vague, distant, something we can't do very much about. It's the same reason people tend to be bad at planning for their retirements.

That said, the world is a better place with the LHC than not. There are far worse things we spend our $ and neurons on that we ought to cull first!

I'm a naturally skeptical person so when I see even the proponents of anthropogenic global warming theory going about their lives business as usual it really raises alarm bells with me.

You're bringing up a problem with spending time/money on the LHC - I'll give you something simpler. Every year there are 150,000,000 Christmas lights sold. Think about that for a second. We're supposedly on the way to our (as you say) ecological doom and we still insist on this tradition. If you want to reduce humanity's carbon footprint I'm not sure there is lower hanging fruit than stopping the manufacture and powering of hundreds of millions of Christmas lights every year.

So when I see everyone doing things like this - basically fiddling while Rome burns - I'm skeptical that anyone really believes in AGW. It doesn't affect my actions mind you because I'm also naturally a conservationist. I think it is only logical to preserve finite resources.