Hacker News Reader

Comment by PopeDotNinja | Hacker News Reader

One could argue that spending a lot of money on a hyper advanced anything would lead to a bunch of cool technologies, even if the primary objective yielded no results. Why spend many billions of euros on something speculative when one could spend the money on something much more likely to produce both primary and secondary benefits?

View on HN

Point me to something that has these characteristics and hasn’t received funding. Anderson made the case to fund many small scale experiments when it came to funding the SSC, but that doesn’t have the same secondary benefits.

Off the top of my head...

- Large-scale climate engineering

- Digitizing human consciousness

- Strong AI

- True life extension

- A replacement for the ISS

If you limit your characteristics to "involves high energy particle physics" it's pretty easy to put blinders on and pretend there aren't large challenges facing humanity that could potentially be solved by hard science progress and a lot of funding.

Well what I meant show me plans with 1000s of pages of itemized highly realistic goals that have a chance of succeeding and yield real technological advances over a period of 30 years with 100s of professors putting their professional careers on the line for a common goal. The overlooked value of the HEP community is that they have moved to the industrial age of scientific endeavour, while almost everyone else is stuck in the Middle Ages.

It would be great if people managed to organized around any of the goals you mentioned, so far it hasn’t happened at a comparative scale for various reasons.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com