At the median United States income of $40,000/year, a single billion dollars is 25,000 person-years of work dedicated solely to that billion dollars. Multiply as appropriate. Nine billion-ish in this case, according to Wikipedia.
Asking what we (the human race) got for nine billion dollars (225,000 person-years of work, at a generous 50 years in the workforce the life work of 4,500 people) deserves more than glib generalities about how wonderful science is or vaguely handwaved "benefits" far outweighing the much-harder-to-handwave "costs".
I'm not saying these questions can't be answered. I'm saying the glittering, glib generalities being offered here ring very hollow against that level of real cost, and you need to brush your arguments up.
(Also, feel free to apply this to any other billion dollars you care to name. I think we take our spending of billions and trillions way too casually, personally. We can and in some sense must spend it (dollars can be hoarded but much of what they represent, like man-hours, can not), but more thought put into it would be nice.)
Are you aware that we might not have had the Internet if it wasn't for government funded research? How much has your quality of life improved as a result of this?
What if these advanced particle accelerators reveal that we understand physics incorrectly (which would be the case if the Higgs doesn't exist)? What if, for instance, we discovered that faster-than-light travel is possible through portals that we can construct out of quantum materials? And then 10-15 years later we have a functional portal device? How much would this improve our lives? (Hint: who needs cars? planes? trains?)
What if we discover a new computing method based on the research started by these particle accelerators, better than quantum computing, that eventually gives us so much computing power that we are capable of developing human-like AI? Or an AI that is many times more powerful than humans? How much would this improve our lives? (Hint: who needs to work anymore?)
Who knows what we will be capable of? It's a fucking gamble. As it stands, we don't know. But the potential rewards outweigh the costs so much as to render them ridiculous.
Believing in God causing him to send you to heaven is a gamble. The potential rewards must outweigh any prior probability of God existing, or any cost to your time spent praying and doing other religious things, right?
All I'm meaning to do here is tell you that your argument does not work. It doesn't work for convincing people, and it doesn't work as a matter of practice the vast majority of the time anyway. Take a straw man: the human species joins together and pools all our resources and the planet's resources into some giant project that, while lots of credible people claim is very unlikely, everyone helps out anyway. But it doesn't work out, and by the time we call it quits we're so starved for resources that we go extinct. Repeat with variations in as many hypothetical worlds as you wish, and maybe 1 or 2 get it right and the payoff was totally worth it because it made humans rulers of the universe or something. That's not a good gamble.
Do you believe that if the possible positive utility to be gained wasn't so vast, we shouldn't do scientific research because then the improbability of that utility and/or the costs that factor in begin to weigh on it? If so, that's an interesting belief. For myself, I don't find the probabilities that unlikely nor the costs that high, I don't need to posit the possibility of untold fortunes due to scientific research to argue that we should continue doing it.
More glittering, glib generalities, by the way. You reach for FTL by the fourth sentence of your post; this is not a sign of strength, it's a sign of desparation. This is not a compelling, practical argument. This whole line of argument is just Pascal's Wager, with "scientific discoveries" instead of "heaven", and roughly as compelling from a logical point of view.
"Are you aware that we might not have had the Internet if it wasn't for government funded research? How much has your quality of life improved as a result of this?"
Might also be a good time to point out that the Internet did not fulfill it's intended goals either -- a communications network resistant to withstanding the loss of huge chunks of it's infrastructure most likely caused by large scale nuclear bombardment by the Soviets.
Great point. DARPA thought they were going to get a unified military communications system. Instead, they enabled a cultural revolution that has proven to be far better at fighting totalitarianism and promoting democracy than anything the military tried to invent.
Normally I don't feed trolls, but I think the point still has to be made. Just because something didn't succeed in it's initial intent doesn't mean it was valueless. Quite often, the secondary use of the thing is far more valuable.
While I agree with your sentiment, your second paragraph is quite telling of probably everyone in this thread: a bunch of geeks secretly hoping [yet consciously knowing it's probably nonsensical], that LHC research will lead to faster-than-light travel/communication and/or time machines.
Asking what we (the human race) got for nine billion dollars (225,000 person-years of work, at a generous 50 years in the workforce the life work of 4,500 people) deserves more than glib generalities about how wonderful science is or vaguely handwaved "benefits" far outweighing the much-harder-to-handwave "costs".
I'm not saying these questions can't be answered. I'm saying the glittering, glib generalities being offered here ring very hollow against that level of real cost, and you need to brush your arguments up.
(Also, feel free to apply this to any other billion dollars you care to name. I think we take our spending of billions and trillions way too casually, personally. We can and in some sense must spend it (dollars can be hoarded but much of what they represent, like man-hours, can not), but more thought put into it would be nice.)