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Comment by ISL | Hacker News Reader

As a physicist, I'm compelled to note that the SSC was projected to exceed its initial budget by a huge margin, perhaps 300%. If we can't constrain costs, we don't get to have nice things.

The loss of the SSC was a tragedy, but the fact that Congress was willing to allocate $4B for such a project (>$7B in today's dollars) would suggest that there was widespread national support for such a thing. At the time of proposal, that was $18 per person in the United States, ballooning to $54/person as projected. That's one heck of a bake sale.

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True, it's sad that it was going to overrun costs. But it was ambitious--imagine how ahead of its time it was if it could have achieved 40TeV 20 years ago.

It's also depressing when you consider what we did decide to spend money on. The cost of air conditioning alone in Iraq was $20B. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/21/air-conditioning-mi... Edit: I'm not suggesting we go to war and not keep our troops air conditioned--it was a necessity given the conditions. I'm suggesting that when such a tiny fractional cost of the war more than the cost of the SSC, maybe our sense of relative costs was warped.

Go live in Iraq without air conditioning for a year and see how willing you'd be to give it up.

There has to be a balance. Yes, we should invest in sciences. No, we will not convince people to give up things that may not matter in the long run, but matter very much in their day-to-day lives. Honestly, you should have used the defense budget as an example.

Yep the SSC would have cost almost $20 billion in the end. I'm not sure how you put a price on the knowledge.

In addition, the SSC technologies spun out into many things and would have spun out into many more.

Even such mundane things as "fire ant control" are important.

People don't realize that science and space spin technology into general usage much faster than military.

Just to play devil's advocate -- and taking several levels of cynicism as a given -- the energy security of the USA is worth far more than what we ended up spending on the Iraq war.

For all the money that the EU has spent on the LHC, it hasn't really paid off to that extent. Even if you consider "the web" as part of that payoff, it's not the equivalent of guaranteeing every person in the western world stable access to cheap energy.

(I'm not saying I agree with that rationale for our adventures in Iraq, I just don't think it's quite fair to make the comparison you're making. There's more at stake in Iraq than a stable democracy for a small country.)

FYI, "the internet" can be fairly credited to DARPA in the USA.

It is "the web" that can be credited to the LHC.

Yep, that's what I meant. Updated!

In a lesser known twist there was heavy debate on the SGML working group that documents shuld have embedded links. For various reasons that did not come to pass but it Effectivly pushed back the web by 5 years until HTML showed up. Presumably if DNS has been out just a little bit sooner the web would have taken off much sooner. Though computer cost and limitations may have set slowed adoption.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Generalized_Markup_L...

The web phenomenom is the appearance of four major components in a very short period of time:

    - HTML
    - HTTP
    - a graphical browser that even my mother can use
    - freely deployable web server software component

Sure, HTML is an important piece of the cake. But the most important one is definitely ... (well, choose for yourself :)

> It is "the web" that can be credited to the LHC.

I've missed something. Could you elaborate?

I can see that as a justification for the first Iraq war, but the second only increased oil prices and destabilized the region.

Just to play devil's advocate -- and taking several levels of cynicism as a given -- the energy security of the USA is worth far more than what we ended up spending on the Iraq war.

I don't think we went to Iraq for the oil.

Even if you did it's probably less secure now than it was under Saddam.

I do

We could have technologically guaranteed the energy security of the US for a lot less than the budget cost of the Iraq war (which itself ignores the costs of the lost lives and soured diplomatic relations).

For $1 trillion we could have blanketed the deserts with solar arrays, Manhattan Project'd fusion, and developed synthetic fuel technology that would have let us turn grid energy into liquid fuels.

The amount spent was truly mind-boggling, and the opportunity cost hard to grasp.

I think you missed the part where I said that I don't buy it as a justification for our adventures in Iraq.

No, I saw that. My point was that, even if you did justify the war by how it provided energy security, there were far cheaper ways to obtain that security.

Which, again, had nothing to do with my point. I said that I don't buy it as an argument for the war.

But I'm not trying to justify the war. I'm saying that the comparison made by the OP between the supercollider and the war isn't valid.

How is it irrelevant whether research investments would have more efficiently achieved the war's aims? Why would that not validate the comparison between the supercollider and a war for energy security?

Maybe, but it's not like people aren't already working on those things. If they were easy problems they would of been solved already. We do actually spend a ton of money on government funded R&D but it's also terribly inefficient in how it's allocated. Grant system is terribly designed. Maybe it reduces corruption but hard to believe the trade-off of not really knowing the people/teams/companies being funded is worth it.

> imagine how ahead of its time it was if it could have achieved 40TeV 20 years ago.

Maybe. I'm not sure Computing power was up to the task. Look at the insane amount of storage the current machine needs.

Typically these sorts of things drive technological innovation.

Well, Reagan did tell them to "throw deep".

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