Setting aside space exploration, whenever this comes up I wonder if there are equivalently expensive big science instruments that could have been built, and could have answered specific questions, but weren't. I can think of other areas where instrumentation has steadily improved (scanning whatever microscopy) but it doesn't seem like a gigantic multi-billion dollar version would move the field forward.
I know it's a fallacy of sorts to think that there's some fixed pot of big-science money and that if we reject a new particle accelerator that we'd be able to re-direct the same money to some other project--that's not how these things get funded. But if I were in charge of directing big science money around, we'd build a lot more gravitational wave detectors.
This is an interesting question, and I may come back to this angle on it. My vague sense is that particle physics evolved through a set of stages where the instruments got more and more complicated to the current point where the only thing that can make any progress costs tens of billions. Other branches of science are still at the point where they can make significant advances through a larger number of cheaper machines; the question is whether they'll necessarily end up at the billion-dollar scale, or whether that's a problem unique to particle physics and the need for ever higher energies.
Setting aside space exploration, whenever this comes up I wonder if there are equivalently expensive big science instruments that could have been built, and could have answered specific questions, but weren't. I can think of other areas where instrumentation has steadily improved (scanning whatever microscopy) but it doesn't seem like a gigantic multi-billion dollar version would move the field forward.
I know it's a fallacy of sorts to think that there's some fixed pot of big-science money and that if we reject a new particle accelerator that we'd be able to re-direct the same money to some other project--that's not how these things get funded. But if I were in charge of directing big science money around, we'd build a lot more gravitational wave detectors.
This is an interesting question, and I may come back to this angle on it. My vague sense is that particle physics evolved through a set of stages where the instruments got more and more complicated to the current point where the only thing that can make any progress costs tens of billions. Other branches of science are still at the point where they can make significant advances through a larger number of cheaper machines; the question is whether they'll necessarily end up at the billion-dollar scale, or whether that's a problem unique to particle physics and the need for ever higher energies.
My first thought would be to spend it on fusion research, something that would truly have a huge payoff if successful.
My preference order is --
1. Spend the money on other science things.
2. Spend the money on particle accelerators.
3. Don't spend the money.
I would probably insert a good number of items between numbers 2 and 3 on this, but otherwise am okay with it.