The Future Circular Collider - a waste of money?

As a successor to the LHC, it has been proposed to build a €20+ billion collider that would be about four times the circumference of the LHC. Even with a collision energy of 100 TeV (10^14 eV) rather than 14 TeV, there's no guarantee that any supersymmetric particles, axions, or other new physics will be discovered. Spread over 20 years or so, the cost isn't that high but if nothing new were found, I think it would cast high energy physics in a a bad light publicly as a sort of boondongle to keep researchers in jobs. 10^14 eV is about 6 orders of magnitude less than the highest energy cosmic rays. Where should we draw the line on trying to reach ever higher energies here on Earth?

 

Many people have always said that scientific research is a waste of money because it has no obvious payoff, but that's misunderstanding what science is for. Every practical invention is the end result of a process that began with abstract theory and exploration with no obvious payoff at the time. We can't know in advance which avenues of exploration will or won't turn up practical applications; that's why we have to look.

 

I'm all for scientific research, but it can be painful to see a program to advanced for its goals like the James Webb telescope languish and get delayed for decades as the price runs up by billions. Or like ITER where (in my opinion) the money could have been much better spent in a non centralized manner on numerous smaller projects to begin to learn faster about plasma generation, containment and Columb barrier physics.

I don't have a real opinion either way, except maybe they could wait a few decades and see about building en even larger model in orbit where travel and construction options will soon be much less constraining and it can be scaled up even more greatly.

 

Building it in orbit would be incredibly expensive although if we could manufacture the parts directly in space rather than hefting them into Earth orbit, that would help and we'd develop lots of useful technologies. You wouldn't need to dig a tunnel but you'd have to construct a huge power supply and, ironically, shield against cosmic radiation besides space debris. The LHC requires 200 MW at peak consumption, even with superconducting magnets so my guess would be of the order of 1 GW. The Moon might be a better site - plenty of room and raw materials to process.

 

We can draw a line for today on reaching higher energies. But i believe that line should keep moving upward through the decades to come. There's no reason to stop. If money is the issue, well, why not cut defense budgets in half to fund it? Not having money to do science really is more a political problem than anything else. And in my view, doing science to unravel mysteries of the universe is far more important than creating and maintaining ways to kill each other.

 

^^this

Finding energy sources or particles isn't unimportant. If more space is needed to see how they work with greater acuity due to relative size and other attributes already discovered... many discoveries are also made via accident or with serendipity. Or a tool made up for an intended purpose could be used in another field or in addition to.

 

About the flip side to what you're alluding to, I would like to pose some open-ended questions:

Is it feasible or possible to drop everything as such?

What might happen if what you propose was enacted, could worse things happen as a result?

Do you have other ideas that would be better that might not lead to worse things? What are these worse things even though you already mentioned some of those?

Note that the questions might address any or many of the issues you brought up.

 

Well, many things aren't possible until they are and become reality. I don't think a global community that doesn't distrust other members is so impossible. Not laying out when or how it will happen, nor whether the path will be smooth.

Could worse things happen? What large scale transformation doesn't carry risks? Britain is teetering on the edge because of a referendum result, the risk of a no deal exit. America is struggling with its conscience for allowing a....character...to become President.

As far as science is concerned, building a more expensive collider that can provide more data and allow more experiments is a good thing. If you're thinking about how it will be perceived if there's no fruit out of it in the future, that's really a political problem, not a scientific one. Those who understand science, know that failure or no result is an integral part of the process. Those who only look for positive, groundbreaking results when they put money into it, don't really understand science.

 

Anyway, 20-odd billion on a supercollider is minor next to the hundreds of billions of dollars the current US government gave out as tax cuts to billionaires, or as corporate subsidies. If you want to cut waste in government spending, stop governments from giving so much more money to people who are already insanely rich.

 

I should have clarified, building in orbit using lunar and asteroidal resources in situ.
the problem (not really a problem per se) of building on the moon is dealing with the long lunar night, in terms of power. Either you go solar (plenty of silicon to make cheap pv panels on the moon) and run in lunar day only, or you need a pretty significant nuclear power plant

 

If you build near the lunar poles, you might be able to harness solar energy over a complete orbit.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_of_eternal_light
Batteries, fuel cells and so on could be used to fill in when necessary, for example during lunar eclipses.
As for nuclear power, the moon is reckoned to be harvestable for He3 for fusion.
Photovoltaics would be the easier choice. The sun is probably going to be around for another 5 billion years and I'm yet to be convinced we can make economically viable fusion reactors.

 

I guess that the science people will at least have an idea what can be achieved by having a larger collider so I guess it isn't a waste?
As for building stuff in orbit.. I only want to see certain things to appear there ASAP, a Stanford torus or, O'Neill cylinder, Bernal sphere or any other large scale space colonie...

 

The purpose of this kind of research is partly to find the things we had no idea were there to find, because we never had the means to find them before. Sure, confirming our existing theories is fine, but disproving them is even more exciting, because it means there's whole new stuff to find out that we never thought of before, and there's no telling where that could lead.

 

The flux of 6x10^19 eV and higher energy cosmic rays is of the order of one per square kilometre per century. Such energies are well beyond the reach of the LHC or its proposed successor. It would be interesting to know more about those particles - their composition, origin and production. At the moment, we only detect them by observing the secondary/tertiary/... particles in the air shower produced when the primary particle collides with the nucleus of an atom in the Earth's upper atmosphere. Cosmic rays with lower energies and much higher fluxes would also be of interest, of course. (The flux goes as roughly the energy to the power -3, although there are a couple of kinks in the graph - the so-called "knee" and "ankle" - where this power law changes slightly in value.)

 

I've often wondered about large structures in space doing different duties.

A large coil could be used like this:
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/10/magnetic-shield-against-massive-solar-flares.html
Or like this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_magnetic_energy_storage

"To achieve commercially useful levels of storage, around 1 GW·h (3.6 TJ), a SMES installation would need a loop of around 100 miles (160 km). This is traditionally pictured as a circle, though in practice it could be more like a rounded rectangle. In either case it would require access to a significant amount of land to house the installation."

If you are going to spend big money on big projects--try to find a way multiple uses overlap.

 

If the Earth's magnetic field ever switches off permanently (and it will eventually), we will need a way to generate a replacement to prevent the solar wind eroding away the atmosphere as well as offering protection from lower energy cosmic rays.

 

It will not switch off permanently; rather, it would gradually decline, be effectively absent for a time, and then increase again with either the same or the reversed polarity. And this process generally takes anywhere from 100 to 1000 years, and occurrences tend to be thousands or millions of years apart, despite the attempts of online fearmongers to panic people by pretending this is some imminent apocalyptic threat.

 

Yeah, it's unlikely to vanish entirely before the Sun expands as a red giant and fries the Earth. I don't know if anyone has modelled by how much the field strength will decline in the next 5 billion years or so. It would be interesting to live through a reversal, but, as you state, it can take longer than the average human lifespan.

 

Well, to be fair, a lot of folks think "pole shift" is a physical thing with continents moving quickly.

Still, having something to block some flares and serve to help power starshot--nice two-fer.

 

The only way to be fair to someone so tragically misinformed is to give them the correct information that they've been unfairly deprived of.