As much as I love science, and I’d much rather see billions spent on a collider than war, I gotta admit this is funny as hell.
“Ok, but what does this collider do, that the one you have in the garage won’t do ?”
Mrs Cern.
Should have had. That was sad when we gave that up in favor of military spending
However, it also wouldn’t have been as big
As a former Texan, yes that’s a city name. And you’ll probably pronounce it correctly.
I’d rather have a 100km particle collider than an aircraft carrier.
What if we build it on a 100km aircraft carrier? Think of the possibilities! heh
What if we put an aircraft carrier into a particular accelerator and spin it up to the speed of light?
The sailors would probably get dizzy.
This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its labourers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
-Dwight D. Eisenhower
His foreign relations record includes a hell of a lot of ratfucking the third world, including being so paranoid about communism he ended up pushing quite a few nations into the Soviet sphere when the coups didn’t work (Cuba, cough cough cough) and directly enabling some of history’s greatest monsters when they did, but he is an American president so grade that on a curve I guess
Yeah, if history has taught as nothing else, it’s that the guy with the biggest stick usually wins. There are many criticisms of the U.S. military, but no one could accuse it of being weak. That kind of deterrence is invaluable.
If only they wouldn’t use that force to invade half the planet…
The peace of Americans is paid for by the terror of dozens of nations. It ain’t cool.
You are fucking beasts
The purpose of military is always dual: to deflect other country’s military and to “protect national interests” (read: attack another country that now has to have military too, and may consider using it for an attack).
Wildly assuming you are American, you should have no issue understanding that defensive forces are not really always defensive.
I am from Europe, from country invaded by nazi Germany so I know well what means an oppressive use of army. But could you give an alternative to the army?
Idk, I’m not sure I could get much use out of a particular accelerator even if I got it running. An aircraft carrier though might be joyride-able, and that I can understand. Might still be moot since both need a team, but if I get to have either one I’d have to at least think on it.
for context 22 billion is a few billions less than what elon musk overpaid for twitter. i don’t think a bigger collider will do anything but I’d like for humanity to have this rather than whatever the fuck the rich are doing now.
22 billion is half of what Elon paid for Twitter. He paid 44 billion.
So this seems like a pretty good bargain for unlocking the secrets of the universe.
if i remember correctly twitter was evaluated as 20 billion before musk bought it, so he overpaid by 24 billion dollars which is a couple billion dollars more than the price tag quoted here.
Yeah… And at least this will generate jobs… And not reduce them like it did on Xitter.
You should think again about what they actually can do.
https://cerncourier.com/a/lhc-upgrade-brings-benefits-beyond-physics/
we almost built a really fucking big collider in the US somewhere in the middle of fuck off land texas.
It died.
Yep, that was when the US jumped the shark. It was the exact moment, Oct 20, 1993, we went “fuck science, we’re only doing short term profits now.”
This would have created a strong science hub and community in Texas, a real reason for the state to be proud of itself, looking towards the future like it did in the 1960s, and that was due to the Democrats with LBJ.
Now instead, they got assault rifle-totin’, shit-kicking knuckle-draggers for life, as the whole place builds up inertia sinking into a festering swamp of its’ own ignorance.
yeah, would be interesting to see the alternate universe where it was finished and built…
By accident, which is just straight-up embarrassing. They voted the wrong way by accident and then never fixed it.
well i mean to be fair, it was also on a really big boon of massive military spending, and the debt was a significant problem, plus this was like a fucking massive collider for the time, and probably even now.
The sheer cost alone of it i think was like 20 billion dollars near the tail end of development, not to mention they had basically redesigned the entire fucking thing by that point since they had dropped an entire team. It was a fucking mess.
Right! Think of those quarters’ balance sheets!
Scientific progress? Peoples bonuses were on the line
Edit: it’s good that our government protected America and left innovation to Europe
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
It only took a couple decades for that whole greedy evil movement to dictate such big decisions.
I bet the US public would vote to fund it if we actually called it Fucking Big Collider and it was the largest in the world.