LHC Successfully Cools To 1.9K In Lead-Up To Restart 177
Smelly Jeffrey writes "The BBC is reporting that the LHC has had all eight of its sectors cooled to 1.9 Kelvin. Their tagline is that it is now 'colder than deep space,' referring to the CMB. LHC engineers have spent nearly $40,000,000 USD on a new system to prevent the 'quench' condition that caused the LHC to be down for warming, repairs, and re-cooling over the last year. The LHC is now cold enough to begin colliding particles in search of the Higgs Boson. High power collisions won't be started until late December, or perhaps early January. However, a low-power beam through parts of the collider could be tested as early as next week!"
Cool! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Cool! (Score:4, Funny)
Where's my goddamned time machine? Hey! Dr. John Bell! Would you quit yer damn' canoodling with 23rd century freemasons, and help me find the damn time machine? I left my electron microscope in the alternate omniverse, and can't see the damn time machine anymore!
Hurry, man! I have some more magnets to go break in Switzewhen.
Re:Cool! (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, we're having a windows 7 party too.
Re:Cool! (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, we're having a windows 7 party too.
Curse you for killing my "colder than Vista's reception" joke!
The earth won't be destroyed according to Hawking (Score:5, Funny)
Here's what Hawking said when giving his Michelson-Morley award lecture [youtube.com]:
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Don't worry you've got some time. They probably won't reach full power until sometime in late 2012...
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more fun than a windows 7 launch party (Score:2)
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Do they throw in a chair with that one ?
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If it's not in operation... (Score:2)
Then why are they spending all the energy to cool the things two months before it's needed?
I don't mean this as a sarcastic comment. I'm genuinely curious.
Never mind. Missed the obvious. (Score:2, Insightful)
They're doing low-power test runs. I managed in my brilliance not to notice either that paragraph in the article or the tagline at the end of the summary. /hangs head in shame.
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If they do find the Higgs in January, they want to have a LOT of jello shots on hand.
At your next hadronic party (Score:2)
Re:If it's not in operation... (Score:5, Funny)
You mean they're spending like there's no tomorrow? Hmmmm.
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I'm crossing my fingers for some newspaper to unthinkingly use the "black hole" analogy to describe the glut of spending..
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At least with a black hole, if you're smart enough to stay away from the event horizon you'll be OK. We, on the other hand, are surely screwed.
Re:If it's not in operation... (Score:5, Insightful)
Because cooling a 27 kilometer long object to 1.9 K takes a lot of time. You can't just keep heating it up and cooling it back down again. You cool it down once, and keep it cooled permanently.
Part of the reason this whole thing took so long in the first place was that it had to be heated up and cooled down again.
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Permanently is a relative term. Time flies differently near black holes.
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Basically the thing doesn't work at all unless it's cooled. Once you get it cooled down you can start testing the various parts to make sure they work. Once you've done that you do an integrated, low power test where you circulate some particles and see if anything breaks. If not, you work your way up until you're at the designed power.
It all takes quite a while.
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Because cooling something to near absolute 0 is not something you can do over night for a multitude of reasons, one of the primary being that there is SO LITTLE energy IN something at 1.9k that it takes a very long time before it bleeds into something else so that it can get cooler.
Remember 'cold' is just 'not hot'. Heat is energy, hotter is more energetic. When you get to 1.9k the atoms are barely vibrating and there is nothing around for the atoms to bump into to transfer the heat energy off it and into
Well it's about time. (Score:3, Funny)
Better double-check... (Score:5, Funny)
Has the LHC destroyed the Earth yet?
NO [hasthelhcd...eearth.com]
Good. Carry on.
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Better put a mirror site on the moon in case.
Re:Better double-check... (Score:5, Funny)
Sorry, but my results differ
http://qntm.org/?board [qntm.org]
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Hmmm, odd... better repeat the experiment just to be sure.
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The comments in that page's source are definite winners.
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Hey, that page is a fake! He hard-coded the answer instead of actually checking!
Wrong summary (Score:3, Interesting)
"LHC engineers have spent nearly $40,000,000 USD on a new system to prevent quenching condition that ..."
No,
1. it is not to prevent quenching, it is to allow helium to escape properly. Superconductors will at some point in their life quench or lose superconductivity. This happens for various reasons though most are due to insufficient cooling, like the last case.
2. Couldn't this say $40,000,000 USD (FORTY MILLION UNITED STATES DOLLARS) to be more dramatic?
Re:Wrong summary (Score:5, Funny)
2. Couldn't this say $40,000,000 USD (FORTY MILLION UNITED STATES DOLLARS) to be more dramatic?
It's European, not Nigerian.
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> It's European, not Nigerian.
Ok, 26.800.000,00 (TWENTY SIX MILLION EIGHT HUNDRED THOUSAND EUROS)
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2. Couldn't this say $40,000,000 USD (FORTY MILLION UNITED STATES DOLLARS) *places pinky finger at corner of mouth* to be more dramatic?
Fixed that for you ;-)
Re:Wrong summary (Score:5)
And couldn't they tell us the cost in euro? I mean, that's the unit in which the LHC is budgeted. Why convert into some volatile foreign currency? Let us know the actual figure, and if we live outside the eurozone then we'll convert into our own local currency by ourselves, thanks.
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Because, like it or not, regardless of the condition of it, the world STILL revolves around it at this point in time. If you wanted it in the original currency, wouldn't you want it in Francs, not Euros
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2. Couldn't this say $40,000,000 USD (FORTY MILLION UNITED STATES DOLLARS) to be more dramatic?
You'd prefer they imply the reader is innumerate?
Saturday Night Live (Score:2)
Destroy the Earth by creating a massive black hole? Nope, not yet...
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Actually, it would be a piddelingly small black hole if it was only the mass of the Earth.
Large Hardon Collider could corrupt civilisation (Score:5, Funny)
The Large Hardon Collider [today.com] is designed to pump various types of hardon up to huge energies before banging them together. However, many concerned citizens without the personal experience or understanding of what hardons do worry at the idea of the large hardons being sucked deep into a black hole.
The device will push large, energised hardons through a ring repeatedly, faster and faster, as smoothly and tightly as possible, until they clash and spray matter in all directions. “It’s nothing that cosmic rays don’t do all the time all over the place,” reassured a particularly buff scientist. “It’s perfectly right and natural.”
Low-energy hardon physics and the temperature dependence of hardon production are well understood, as is the process of a hardon smoothly entering the nucleus. But some question what may happen at greater, hotter energies.
Church leaders have come out at the device. “They’re the same polarity!” said Pope Palpatine XVI. The Church worries that strange matter may recruit normal matter and turn it strange.
The Large Hardon Collider was to launch last September, but this has been delayed due to inexplicable and ill-timed failure to get a beam up. “I’m so sorry,” stammered a scientist, “this has never happened to us before.”
Re:Large Hardon Collider could corrupt civilisatio (Score:2)
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I think there's a place in West Hollywood you can get that done for about $20.
(Bring a friend for 10% off.)
goodbye everyone (Score:2)
it was nice knowing you
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While we're on the topic, I would like to point out that if you subscribe to the infinite universe theory (or the infinite parallel universe theory aka multiverse), there are an infinite worlds where the LHC *DOES* produce a black hole and destroy all humanity, so your trolling may not be far off.
That probability is small, but according to those currently researched theories, world destruction by the LHC has happened before, will happen again, is happening now, and we could just be on
OT - Where's the movie (Score:2)
I refuse to believe, 3 years after seeing the original sig, that you are still making a movie :-)
1900 degrees ??!? (Score:3, Funny)
Doesn't seem very cool to me, in any commonly used temperature scale!
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The url says "19K". Which one do we believe?
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yes, but how many cold microbrews would it take to reach that temp?
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Almost there, but not quite. (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, the whole system is getting close to 1.8K, but some magnets aren't quite down there yet. [web.cern.ch] About 2/3 of the ring has cyro authorization (cold enough to power up the magnets) but the magnets haven't been energized yet. All the magnets have to be powered up. Then comes low power beam testing and alignment. Then maybe they can do some science.
There are supposed to be two big fixes in place now. First, the quench protection system now covers not just the magnets, but the connections to them. (The basic idea is that if a superconducting magnet ceases to be superconductive at some hot spot (in which case all the energy in the magnet comes out as heat), the system dumps the energy into resistive loads, and heats up the entire magnet quickly to make it resistive, so that the energy is dumped throughout the magnet, not just at the hot spot. Last time, a hot spot developed at a welded splice. Second, the venting system for dealing with the gaseous helium released after a quench has been improved, with bigger rupture discs. Last time, the vents weren't big enough, and there was substantial damage to the cryogenic plumbing.
None of this has anything to do with the physics. It's all plumbing and DC power control.
The original design documents say a quench is supposed to be recoverable within three hours. That was rather optimistic.
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It should also be noted that these guys are doing work on things that have never been done on this scale before. Most of it has been done on a smaller scale at other colliders, but any time you do something for 'the first time', something is going to go wrong.
This is why its called experimentation and not something else like 'paint by numbers'
Personally, I think they fact that they built this damn thing and got it working as quickly as they did as well as it did the first time around is DAMN IMPRESSIVE.
Prediction (Score:2)
Shortly thereafter the flux of strange quarks created at the same time will cause the fabric of the Universe to reformat to its original state, just like last time. Thus bringing the end of our world and the beginning of the next cycle as predicted by the Mayan callendar.
Or maybe it will be more of a "Silent Earth" scenario. (Google it, I'm too tired to link it myself, its bedtime)
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Well, at least that will get rid of that incorrect apostrophe in your signature line. Whew!
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Seriously, Thanks for pointing that out. If my sis-in-law (a writing instructor) had found that first I may have never heard the end of it.
An intoxicating mix? (Score:2)
Well hey, the Silent Earth scenario seems pretty groovy!
An intoxicating mix of mellow dance and ambient soul... [silentearth.co.uk]
The earth reformatted, not so much. Unless... I head for the boot sector!
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I predict another one of those DAMNED bosons will come back in time and break another handful of magnets again. Damn causality-breaking bosons, s'not right!
Sew wee send somewon too the fewcher two stop the first mate frum sending the boson bak.
(Sorry, best joke I can muster on little sleep. Also covers my sleep-deprived spelling errors!)
Noooooooo! (Score:2)
At fucking last ... (Score:2)
i've been waiting for this ... dont ask why.
Re:40 MILLION USD (Score:5, Informative)
When every government balance sheet is dripping red, why are we doing this again ?
Your not. . . the LHC is localed in Geneva, and was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research. The monetary numbers were just converted to USD because the article is written/targeted to a US audience.
*Knock Knock* Hi, its the rest of the world here at your door, we'd love for you to come out and visit sometime!
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Let's try a list!
- Roads.. maybe you don't use them?
- Well regulated skies so the plane you're landing in doesn't have an unexpected conjoining with another one taking off
- A nationwide electrical grid
- Required emergency care, regardless of ability to pay (that comes out of a similar source as medicare/medicaid - without it, no pay, no treatment.. got hit by a car walking down the street? No insurance? Tough luck, bub)
- Regulated banking sys...ok. bad example.
Government may do a lot wr
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-The aqueduct
-Sanitation
-Roads
-Irrigation
-Medicine, Education, Health
-Wine
-Public Baths
-Public order
All right... all right... but apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order... what have the Romans done for us?
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Re:40 MILLION USD (Score:4, Funny)
>*Knock Knock* Hi, its the rest of the world here at your door, we'd love for you to come out and visit sometime!
But whenever we do, you guys tell us to go home! Is that because of our obsession for things that go boom, or some other issue?
Re:40 MILLION USD (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, WE (as in the US) have been one of the largest contributor countries, even though we aren't officially a part of the CERN treaty group. The US has nearly 1000 scientists involved in the various LHC experiments, and has directly contributed nearly $600M to the construction of the ATLAS and CMS experiments. Plus, it will contribute to construction of ALICE and LHCb, and many millions more in grants to US based research groups for operations and upgrades. And it has built two Tier 1 LHC computing centers (at Brookhaven and Fermilab), dozens of Tier 2 centers, and as well as a fully equipped remote operations center. So, I date say "yes", the US is slightly involved with this project....
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... ATLAS ... CMS ... ALICE ... LHCb ...
Woah, woah, that's a tad too many scientific buzzwords! I'm all dizzy around here!
Cue the LHC Rap [google.com] ...
Actually... (Score:2)
Actually "every government" is not having economic problems, unlike the US some European countries have come out of the recession.
Some Europeans countries are actually "in the black" with surpluses, and little or no unemployment. The US media is not very good at informing the public about the situation around the world.
Oh, and 40 million USD is not the real cost to European countries since it's obviously payed for in local currencies (Swiss Franc, Euros). The exchange rate inflates the numbers.
And it is a t
Less Than 6 cents (Score:2)
What? How on Earth did you end up with 17.5 cents?
$40 000 000 / 700 000 000 = 0.06 (0.057) cents
Oh, wait you screwed up the numbers! You did it the other way around! You divided 700m people by 40m USD! That would give you 17.5 cents.
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Nope. Metric cents.
Re:40 MILLION USD (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:40 MILLION USD (Score:4, Funny)
Mini blackholes will suck up the deficits.
Re:40 MILLION USD (Score:5, Insightful)
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Other than you tactfully left out the word corruption, that's the best and most succinct description of the situation I've yet read.
In such a description you necessarily have to leave out things like leaders demonizing the people they are about to attack in order to keep themselves in power and so on (I'm protecting you from those awful sub-human evil fill_in_the blank, so you need me to stay in, and increase, my power), corporations that are now more powerful than all single countries and most coalitions o
Re:40 MILLION USD (Score:5, Insightful)
"Restraint" implies something desired, but totally unnecessary.
When you go deeply in debt paying for college, it's not a "lack of restraint" that put you in that bad situation, but an investment, which may or may not pay off.
So why is the government so roundly critized for similarly trying to get the education dollars remotely back up to where they were (per-capita) 30+ years ago?
I guess NASA represents a lack of restraint as well.
Roads, too. As well as all forms of public transit.
The government exists specifically to pay for all those things which we all find beneficial to society, and would be impractical to do individually, or otherwise piecemeal.
And even those areas of flagrant fraud and waste, while requiring a fix, won't come close to making up the national deficit. The bailout money, while significant this year, will barely be noticeable average over the decades between major bailouts, AND would presumably end up costing everyone far more money, if that money wasn't spent where and when it was needed.
It's only on /. that the rabid libertarian sentiment doesn't get you laughed out of the room. It's idiotic on it's face.
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evilviper, if I had points, I would SO mod you up!
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How is it costing us LESS money to keep the banks afloat so that housing prices can stay artificially inflated, maintaining an artificial bubble at great expense? How is it costing us LESS to spend resources on WAR, which is not an investment but money tossed in to a blackhole never to be recovered? How is it costing us LESS to pay people NOT to do things? None of those things are an investment. They're all tossing money at buying ABSOLUTELY NOTHING and maintaining poorly run countries and businesses at gre
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Bubble? Where the hell do you live? Housing prices around here are 1/5th what they were just a few years ago. That's lower than pre-bubble prices, while the population has been growing the whole time.
Well, A) G
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So you covered the bailout with wild speculation on what might have happened, how about the GPs other points about military waste (are all those bases in over half the countries on the planet really neccessary?), the ludicrous primary industry manipulation that ends up with farmers paid to not grow crops, the auto industry that can't compete still not competitive thanks to handouts? Massively corrupt bureaucrats selling our childrens future to their cronies in every industry is what puts us in the red, not
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And even those areas of flagrant fraud and waste, while requiring a fix, won't come close to making up the national deficit. The bailout money, while significant this year, will barely be noticeable average over the decades between major bailouts, AND would presumably end up costing everyone far more money, if that money wasn't spent where and when it was needed.
Read this over:
http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/102xx/doc10297/SummaryforWeb_LTBO.pdf [cbo.gov]
I know, I know, the CBO is part of the "vast right wing conspiracy".
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Also, understand that no government spending is "necessary". Rather, all government spending is in pursuit of two goals, re-election, and a cushy job for when the public realizes that you have betrayed them.
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It's only on /. that the rabid libertarian sentiment doesn't get you laughed out of the room. It's idiotic on it's face.
What rabid libertarian sentiment? How does a generic criticism of US government spending suddenly qualify as rabid libertarian sentiment?
Here's my take. Public funds aren't free money. Every public service you mention comes at a cost. Government is not just a list of benefits. In that light it is reasonable to become concerned, either if there is a surfeit of government spending where the benefit doesn't exceed the cost or if the trend of overall spending seems to be going to unsustainable places. In my
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Having waves of elderly people homeless is a huge cost to the public. So much so that the minimal amount of money they get from social security is actually a reduction in government spending on them.
Social security is just fine. Medicare is a huge problem which threatens to bankrupt the US. However, Medicare is just one
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NASA's requested 2010 budget is ~$20 billion. Whether or not that's a waste of money hardly matters since it's (comparatively) a very small amount.
I'm talking about things like the military budget of about a trillion dollars a year. Or social security, to protect people's "right" to not work (notice: I'm not claiming some people can't work, but social security exists so everyone can stop working because there's this idea that after a certain age, people deserve to mooch off of everyone else).
And the bailou
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By all means... Prove it!
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It's been estimated that most of the world's economy is the result of basic quantum mechanics research. The money put into QM research has been an absolutely incredible investment. Perhaps they're hoping that it will continue to be so.
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Re:40 MILLION USD (Score:5, Informative)
I've seen various estimates, but Leon Lederman (Nobel prize winner in physics) discusses it in his book "The God Particle." I think it was even in a similar context - why spend so much money doing high energy physics?
Sorry it's not a link, but the book is well worth reading. It's about the history of particle physics research, from an inside perspective, culminating with a discussion of the Higgs boson.
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Also, the physics/astronomy community benefits greatly from the success of LHC, and the worldwide scientific community as a whole also benefits. Now, who benefits from the wars?
Defense contractors.
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I'll keep an eye out for Doc Brown and his Delorean
Re:Huge Waste of Taxpayer Dollars (Score:5, Insightful)
Because the food those people eat is produced using fertilizers, steel structures, engines based on petroleum combustion, transit networks, irrigation systems, computers and, ultimately, a market for the food - all of which come about because of technological advances (computers wouldn't work today if we didn't know about quantum mechanics - modern PC's are affected by quantum-scale artefacts), most of which were funded by military investment (Internet, etc.) or academic institutions, designed and implemented by people that went to university to study something other than fertilizer, using mathematics from previously theoretical subjects that they found could apply to modern physics, using even vaster ranges of technology to achieve their goals.
Did you know that the Moon missions visibly pushed scientific advancement for *decades* before and after they occurred? Did you know that previous "waste of time", purely-theoretical, large-scale, cutting-edge technology now powers most of the world, the world's satellites, thus world communications, thus enable people to even *find* those people, let alone help them?
How about that computer you just posted this troll on? Have you any idea how many man-hours it takes to build that? Considering your attitude, I should take it back, leave those raw materials in the ground and give someone a job instead... that makes sense, no? Or how about you *think* for a second about where those people are going to get their houses, pharmaceuticals, food, warmth, clothing, how they'll be found and helped and their progress tracked by your government to ensure they show up as a statistic at least?
Eighty years ago, the highest-level scientific research of splitting the "unsplittable" atom helped discover and then (50 years ago) harness the most destructive force held by man, culled from the annals of scientific research and weaponry, and now makes it power most of your country, provide pharmaceuticals, medical scanners and countless other innovations. Now think what'll happen in another 80 years when the tech discovered, manufactured and researched based on the findings of the LHC hits your country.
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You delivered your argument well, but you could say something similar about any scientific goal, for absolutely any amount of money. Will the LHC lead to practical technology in 80 years? You think so, but how plausible is that really and why? What if I think we should spend $20B to study the mating habits of snails and promise some huge breakthrough in 80
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I wouldn't instantly dismiss spending $20B on studying mating habits of snails. Given that snails are very helpful to farmers, and given that farmers received 10 times that in aid ($258B) in a single year and the total market is about $1.5 trillion, spending a 10% of the given aid on studying how to produce better snails could provide significant returns in the long run.
If the study resulted in just a 0.1% increase in crop production, it would pay for itself in a single year!
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True, but doesn't change the conclusion that it would be worth investigating, and such a study shouldn't be dismissed out of hand.
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What if I think we should spend $20B to study the mating habits of snails and promise some huge breakthrough in 80 years, will you also think that's a good investment?
Why not? We'd no doubt see great advances in progress decades before and after throwing $20 billion at snails. Surely, it was The Snail Project with its inspiration and snails and stuff that inspired us to do all these wonderful things.
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If I had points, I would SO mod you up!
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After you (Score:2)
Unless you are at a library posting from a public computer you are hardly living your own words. It seems to me your own existance is substantially less valuable than the LHC, which at least has some potential for benefitting humanity.
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For the love of God man, think about all of those poor Physicists, Engineers and Technicians that would be out of a job and slowly starving while living in the starlight hotel if we did that!
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No. But you can see a black hole by the way it distorts the sky around its edges.