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Comment by aronpye | Hacker News Reader

I’m well aware of the differences between particle physics and climatology.

My point, which you have just made the logical fallacy of straw manning, still stands. Scientists of all fields have commented on climate change, Stephen Hawking, Brian Cox, Neil Degrasse Tyson have all opined in climate change, yet also advocate for vanity projects such as the large hadron collider.

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Since LHC isn't a vanity project your whole argument breaks down. Also, climate change is largely not a topic for science, but for politics. Politicians know what to do, they just don't want to. No amount of science can fix this.

My point is, if it isn’t clear, is that scientists who think the world is being put in danger by climate change shouldn’t be requesting or otherwise accept money that would be better spent combatting said existential threat. To accept money on huge projects with no clear benefit to humanity when there are much more pressing matters at hand is either to deny those problems don’t exist or act with hypocrisy.

P.S. spending money on something that adds no clear value is the definition of a vanity project.

P.P.S. My argument also doesn’t hinge on whether the LHC or its successor is a vanity project or not, I think we can all agree spending 20bn+ on lifting people out of poverty or combatting climate change is a much more worthy recipient of tax payer dollars.

Following your logic we should just give up spending any money on any non climate science. Science is what enabled us to lift billions out of poverty in the first place.

Actually the washing machine and basic sanitation is what has lifted a large part of the world out of poverty, not high energy physics.

Do you think that some scientist if you give him a ton of money can invent a cheap way of removing Carbon from air?

The solution is much more simple, stop putting Carbon in the atmosphere, this is something society needs to solve not scientists.

Think it live Bob is throwing shit in the river and you blame scientists that they can't invent something to clean the water that is cheap.

We could build modern nuclear reactors, we can fund research into fusion at the same time but until fusion is ready we could at least stop closing nuclear plants and finish/upgrade the existing ones. Probably much more money is spent in the entertainment industry in a year then in all CERN history.

In order to stop pollution we need to invest money in an alternative, you simply can’t stop the economy to prevent pollution, Covid-19 style, forever and expect society not to regress to pre-industrial revolution. Hence, in order to fund an alternative you need the funds to fund an alternative, which necessitates not spending limited tax payer dollars on limited impact science experiments.

From my comment elsewhere: spending 20bn+ on lifting people out of poverty or combatting climate change is a much more worthy recipient of tax payer dollars

CERN invented the WWW, WWW lifted people from poverty like me that I work from a village in a third world country as a developer.

Maybe the super magnets,detectors, software, mathematics and who knows anti-mater or black holdes could also have a similar effect as WWW. There is a lot of money in he world that is pent in entertainment industry so make a carbon tax or invent some economic mumbo-jumbo to grab a percent from there and force electric car investments or fusion reactors. Take Apple money and should be enough

I’ll grant you that HTTP and HTML technologies did come out of CERN, but access to clean water and a sewage system amongst other things is what lifted you out of poverty. It’s no good having access to cat memes if you’re dying from dysentery. Developed countries were out of extreme poverty long before the internet and WWW was invented.

Besides, issues like climate change and resource contention will disproportionately affect impoverished countries. I think combatting those issues is a higher priority than investigating particle physics with no immediate or apparent benefit. Would you rather use that money for a particle accelerator or give everyone access to clean water?

Clean water, sewage, central hearing etc are not free, without a good paying job there are still people that have the toilet outside, do not have running water and use wood for heating.

So is a combination of more factors like local economy and government to grow and build roads,bring internet and natural gas but you also need the individuals to afford paying for those. The web helped a lot and if you see the remote working that is happening now you can't deny that CERN had a giant contribution. 1

Maybe the issue is not that CERN proposes this things but the fusion guys are not united in a big collaboration as CERN is.

People are only permitted to care about one thing, now?

It’s called priorities, so yeah. Do you care more about people or about discovering super symmetry?

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