alt Hacker NewsIn the scope of international cooperation, tens of billions of dollars is not very much money. For context, the U.S. economy generates $10 billion every ~3 hours. One private company, Google, spends $10 billion in about 2 weeks.
So look at it this way. Let’s take a bunch of the smartest people alive, train them for decades, give them a month of Google money, and they’ll spend 30 years advancing engineering to probe the very fabric of reality. And everything they learn will be shared with the rest of humanity for free.
Sounds like a pretty good deal to me.
Replies
> Let’s take a bunch of the smartest people alive, train them for decades, give them a month of Google money
Unpopular opinion: Google makes an insane amount of money, so they can afford this salary. The CERN (or whatever your favourite research institute is), on the other hand, is no money-printing machine.
Takes like this are an optical illusion meant to create the idea that there is an insane amount of money freely floating around that is just being hoarded.
But just like that money is generated, it's also all spent.
So the actual hard part is deciding what not to spend money on so we can build some crazy physics machines with a blurry ROI instead.