Oh no, not fundamental science that cannot immediately be capitalised on!
Seriously, why do substantial parts of this forum immediately turn anprim the moment fundamental physics research is concerned?
I don’t think it’s wrong to see poverty and equality as a priority over that, if I’m honest. It shouldn’t be that surprising that people have an issue with billions of dollars being spent on things not currently improving lives when there are people living like hell.
But that’s entirely a problem of distribution of goods stemming from the predominant mode of economic organisation. Not building a larger particle collider would solve exactly zero problems which stem from capitalist distribution of goods and resulting artificial scarcity.
Sure. But that doesn’t change people being upset that this is prioritised over living standards and lifestyles. People want that solved first and that’s a perfectly ok emotion to be having that shouldn’t be chastised.
The thing to push is that with capitalism is that they would rather fund this than feed and house people, because not feeding people is the point, by design. Even if this is unprofitable, it’s still a thing they’d prefer to spend on than feed or house people.
Is there a world in which clearing land of animals, people, etc to make room for mines, extracting tons of ore from the ground, shipping(very harmful in and of itself in this society) it to a second place (cleared, etc) to be forged (at high temperatures requiring some energy source shipped from a third place (cleared etc)) and then shipping it to a fourth place (cleared, etc) to be built into a giant energy-consumer for perpetuity won’t be harmful?
In a leftist utopia we wouldn’t prioritize either because we’d do both. In a transitory state we could do plenty of both (see China), and the cost of this project is not large relative to national projects like housing, education (which this is part of anyway), or healthcare for all. In our current capitalist hellscape shutting this type of research down would reduce no poverty and win no allies.
We’re always going to allocate resources to projects that do not address the most basic of needs. Criticism of that comes from a much better place than reactionaries yelling “you can’t complain about being poor unless you live like a monk,” but you can make all the same arguments against it.
because its hard to see any value in fundamental physics research when we can’t even figure out how to live on this planet in a sustainable way that doesn’t involve killing hundreds of millions of people and destroying vast parts of its ecosystem and exterminating half+ of all species on earth?
The scientests doing this research have been screaming at the top of their lungs how we could live sustainably for 6 decades.
“Scientific research is a waste because capitalism exists” is up there with “why should I have to use paper straws when billionaires have private planes” level take
if we can manage that, though, it would be kinda useful to already have a head-start on the particle colliding. More practically, the absolute peak of money for the sciences is a drop in the bucket compared to heavy industry, which is were most of the sustainability work needs to be done.
