They've played us for absolute fools.

But look how fast we can make those little fuckers go!

It's just like slot car racing, round and round, but.... you know.... faster. And yeah, it's more expensive than a regular slot car track, I guess. But still, those particles will beat any slot car you care to pick! So there's that. Welllll not those fancy slot cars with them high performance motors, I mean, that's a completely different ballgame there, we can't compete with that.

But still, those particles whizzing around, it's gonna be pretty cool. I reckon we should do it.

So anyway, thank you for reading my financial proposal for the SuperLHC.

I thoroughly enjoyed this. Then I saw I already liked it. 15 years sounds short but it's actually a decent amount of time.

Not quite circular, they only got 26% of the tunnel dug. Still, 23 km is quite a long tunnel to leave sitting empty

Yeah, but how many brown children can it kill?

But we could kill kids in the middle east somewhere for that money!

The Moon’s daytime is half a month long and can reach 120 C so we’d need some pretty powerful heat shielding. And there’s no ozone layer to protect the electronics from radiation, and I’m pretty sure the Moon orbits outside of Earth’s magnetosphere. And the shielding used for such a project could also be used to fix climate change here (and terraform Venus later) with orbital parasols. And whatever unimaginable technology we’d need for such an ambitious project may as well be used to run a grid of electromagnets and power lines across Mars to give it a magnetic field

Yeah everything's been kinda fucked ever since, hasn't it... i mean... it was 2008 right before obama being elected and i really don't think the "correct" path of the future would have involved r-money or mccain winning so at least SOME shit would be the same, but still...

Off the top of my head, I can't think of any advance that didn't at some point depend on people just dicking around to see what they could see.

"What happens if we spin this stick really really fast against this other stick?"

"Cool! What happens if we put some dried moss around it?"

"That's nuts, man! Hey, I wonder what happens if we toss some of our leftovers in there?"

"C'mon over here, guys. You gotta taste this!"

At worst, a project like this keeps a lot of curious people in one place where we can make sure they don't cause harm with their explorations. At best, whole new industries are founded. Never forget that modern electronics would never have existed without Einstein and Bohr arguing over the behaviour of subatomic particles.

Say the actual construction cost is $100 billion over 10 years and operational costs are $1 billion a year. Compared to all the stupid and useless stuff we already spend money on, that's little more than pocket lint. We could extract that much from the spending of one military alliance and it would look like a rounding error. Hell, we could add one cent to the price of each litre of soft drinks, alcoholic beverages, and bottled water and have money left over.

TIL

I think we realized halfway through building that we couldn't build bombs.

I'm just amazed that funding $22 billion is even an issue when the project is being backed by the EU, and partially the US, since we never built ours....

That's a rounding error for both entities

But particles don't make my dick feel big

US Congress: Audit NASA > Audit the Pentagon

EU: Audit CERN > Audit Luxemborg/Malta/~~UK~~